My adventures next took me to another school featured earlier. I’ve been here every spring, but here’s a gallery from 2021, which is the only one so far. Apparently I’ve just come here, realized that there’s still no way in and just gone on without taking any photos.
And here’s one of the teacher apartment buildings of that school. It has suffered a fire and left waiting.
Moving on around the school. That pine tree must be about as old as the building. Or maybe even older.
Featuring fresh graffiti.
The rain shelter for pupils. It was a surprisingly low construction.
Learning French.
And giving out other important commands like don’t litter and jobs for everybody.
Some quite fresh tags.
Everything behind those boards is windows.
Each classroom even had a doorway outside according to the old plans.
There was a strange hut made of wood and plastic constructed outside the facade of one of the wings. This photo looks inside of it.
This wing was decorated by the final pupils in this school.
The old school was U-shaped. It was replaced by a modular building seen to the left.
The facade facing the street. The gym is probably to the right.
Another look at the teacher apartment building.
Also well sealed from the back. Nothing more to see here.
So I had my new summer car. And I started the season like so many others. With a trip around the capital region checking out on locations I had seen so many times before.
This here is the same elementary school featured earlier in 2021 and probably a few more times in lonely photos in random blog posts. It still sits empty, and the city has promised to make solutions.
It does have video surveillance, which actually doesn’t seem very effective any more.
Several of the doors also feature fresh plywood, which probably means, that people are regularly breaking in.
Some of the boards seem especially fresh, which means that I have again missed the best possibilities.
One of several small courtyards.
The oldest plywood has sat there for ages. Vandals have even started to dismantle the brick walls to get in.
The next small courtyard.
Somebody has again tried to carve and burn their way in.
Some more fresh board. I wish I had been here a week or a month ago.
The final corner of this side of the school.
Moving on to the other side. The gym is in that wing to the left.
The gym wing.
It is easily recognizable from the big windows near the roofline.
And then the school’s two wings photographed from my usual angle.
The city has removed the school’s name and their coats of arms from the wall. But the clock is still displaying the right time. The power is on.
I returned on my next adventure a few days later. Still couldn’t find a way in.
As I started driving my new summer car home, I was still getting used to its quirks such as the broken fuel gauge. I fixed this issue by writing every single refuelling stop to a notebook adding the odometer reading next to it. I figured out that I could stay safe by calculating the consumption at 10 litres per 100 kilometers. That was far above the top, even with a broken Lambda.
But I soon realized, that the Lambda may indeed be broken. Poor old Iiris seemed to eat up quite a lot of fuel.
Meanwhile I still was on a mission to photograph abandoned buildings. And I soon noticed something interesting by the highway.
This one looks like a long since abandoned farm.
And if it looks like a farm, it probably is a farm. The collapse has already advanced pretty far. One section of the building is gone and so is the porch. The formerly red building has been painted yellow at some point.
The foundations of the porch look fairly sturdy, though.
And inside we are. This has originally been the house of a rather large farm. Now its glory days are long since gone.
The building was in a pretty bad state. The roof was seriously leaking and the ceiling of the ground floor had already collapsed in several places.
The old oven was really beautiful.
The well known graffiti artist Hende has been here way back in 2016. The grandma asks to step in.
The stairs up. There was no way I was going there. In fact I had serious doubts about even going further in the building than the hall.
A better look at the large rooms inside the building. That chair is beautiful.
Remains of old wallpaper.
The collapse has been total in some sections, as you can see.
Even worse signs of collapsing.
The highway. And my new summer car seen through a window.
Nature is slowly taking over. I’m not even sure if this building still stands.
But nevertheless it was an entry! And I even got the car safely back home.
As April was ending, it was again time to start looking for a new summer car. In 2020 I had an old Volvo 850 called Siiri, which was just like my first ever car, in 2021 I rented Egon, a Volvo 960 from my friend. In 2022 and 2023 I drove Alice, a Volvo 940, which took me through every single current and former municipality in Finland during one summer. As I ran out of money to fix the 30 year old lady, I sold it in the end of summer.
Let’s just say, I wasn’t the least bit enthusiastic about the summer of 2024. The summer of 2023 had already been a disappointment in terms of photography and I really missed my dear old Alice. I even contacted the buyer to try to buy her back, but he refused stating that the car was just too good to sell.
I looked and looked, but found nothing interesting. My first word was Volvo and I had so far had seven of them. I looked at old 850’s and V70’s, but none of them really felt like my car unlike all the others I had owned. As I am fond of 1990’s cars, I even searched for station wagons older than 1995 costing less than 2000 euros. I got 25 results: 24 Volvos and one Mercedes.
I finally chose the one which seemed the least red flag, a 1996 Volvo 850. The owner told me, that it had starting issues, but was otherwise in good shape. So I travelled to Pori to have a look at it.
And eventually I returned home with this one. A cousin of Saara and Siiri, I called it Iiris. I paid 1200 for it, and it did indeed seem like an ok car despite the starting issue and the fact that the fuel gauge didn’t work.
I had a plan. I would again try to visit all current and former municipalities of Finland during one summer to prove, that any old car could do this and Alice was no special. And after that, unless I found the spark again, I would retire from urban exploration after the 2024 season.
And here is the final location of the day. This rather original house has most likely been built in the late 1960’s or early 1970’s.
When I first visited in 2019 the two Range Rovers seemed intact. Now glasses have been broken and parts have gone missing.
Trying to find a way in through the back side.
A surprising feature: the basement seems larger than the building itself.
A sneak peek inside the living room from a window. There were lots of books, magazines, old furniture and art. There’s been a lot of money in this home back in the days. A large house on a popular area in the capital region, two Range Rovers and this.
This is apparently the living room.
There is a clear way in, but it is impossible to enter. The building is so moldy, it is hard to breathe even on the outside of it. So it was again a no go.
This was the end of our adventure. We agreed to go again at a later date.
But a plan was already hatching in my mind how it would be possible for me to explore this location.
After the randomly found workshop and office building we took the next bus and rode to our main location. A street in the suburbs.
There are two abandoned buildings on the same stretch of road on the popular area. Both are large one family houses. Apparently one is the childhood home of their current owner, the other one is also in his ownership. The second house has been featured several times earlier, as I’ve tried to find a way in.
The second house hasn’t been featured, because there has been no vandalism. The place is intact and thus a no go.
There was this classic car on the yard covered in what looks the ruins of a shed.
Nothing more to see here. Let’s have a look at the following house.
These have probably been the offices of the association.
And surprisingly they featured more small rooms.
As the blinds were shut, it was pretty dark inside.
And all windows were covered in graffiti.
Again some pretty pointless stuff.
And this mess relates to the previous tag.
More graffiti.
Another view of the corridor.
The back stairway featured an elevator for wheelchairs.
The elevator’s service diary and alarm map.
Another graffiti filled room.
Some more.
No major renovations were ever conducted here. Everything is in the shape of the 1970’s including the plastic floor and inner walls with windows at the top.
More tagged windows and mess.
It looks like somebody stole the pipes.
All walls featured large pieces in this room.
Apparently more than just the pipes has been stolen.
Apparently one of the offices had been rented out to a forest agency.
The final photos from the upstairs. It soon turned out, that the kids we met had locked us in the section of the building we were in. Needed some creativity to get out, but we eventually did.
The following time I passed the building, demolition had already started. A new block of flats now occupies the lot.
And the reason to the demise of this building – the express tram number 15. As it was built, a lot of lots on its route were replanned – including this one.
As we were taking the bus to our second planned location, we passed a building with broken windows and graffiti. That’s why we hopped off at the next stop and went to have a better look.
Yeah, definitely abandoned.
The front of the building showed extensive vandalism.
The building was L-shaped.
A better look at one wing.
The building was built in the 1970’s by an association for the blind. According to detail plan documents it contains work spaces for blind craftsmen, the offices of the association, some apartments and some spaces which have been rented out to entrepreneurs.
And so we are inside.
The place was a dull 1970’s office building.
My friend is to the left, but we soon noticed, that we weren’t alone in the building. As soon as the kid in the doorway saw us, he exclaimed “hey, it’s the photographer”. They were the same kids we met at the school.
The first room.
The place had been thoroughly emptied.
Moving further along the corridor.
There were several small rooms along it.
The end is near.
A larger room here.
The cupboard under the stairs.
The ode to a drink?
The following corridor.
Here we have a bigger room.
Every wall and window was covered with graffiti.
All windows were also broken.
This was basically what this building was about.
Another room.
A guitar company and a seamstress have been working here.
Back in 2022 or 2023 I met a young indie artist at a folk music festival. In the spring of 2024 she posted on Instagram, that she was looking for a certain kind of apartment for the filming of a music video. I didn’t have the apartment, but I told her that I’d love to be an extra, if I could be of assistance.
The filming was done in March. Basically the setting was a party. The role of most of the people was to drink beer and talk, and I am naturally talented at both. So I spent hours talking with people I barely knew. The discussions were very similar: who are you, what do you do, how do you know the artist, etc.
It had been a long day, I was slightly tipsy and it was time for the last scenes. I started talking with a young woman and went through the usual discussion. When I told her about Deserted Finland, she told me she had been roaming around abandoned buildings in Helsinki since she was 14. We agreed to go urbexing together some day.
The video can be seen here. It turned out I was a lot older than everybody else in the party, but every party needs an odd old uncle telling strange stories, don’t they?
An around a month after the filming I went exploring with my new friend.
Our first location was the old Apollo school, which was about to be demolished. This was one of the last possibilities to photograph it.
There wasn’t a lot of wall, which hadn’t been painted over.
The daycare center next door was already finished.
And the demolition crew had already built fences around the school.
Had my friend not spotted a gap in the fence, we wouldn’t have been able to get to the other side.
And so we are in a narrow and badly bashed corridor. We heard voices as soon as we entered and almost left. Then we realized, that there were some kids inside the building. And we’re not afraid of kids.
We found the kids in the school gym. They asked if we had permission to enter. Of couse we didn’t. But neither had they. They quickly vanished.
As you can see, demolition has already started. The gym acts as a recycling station, where different materials are sorted.
That has been one large scene.
The basket has so far escaped demolition.
The use of wood and bricks is quite ordinary for 1980’s buildings. They give the place a warm appearance.
This is the main lobby of the school. Demolition of the insides of the building has advanced pretty far.
The main entrance seen from the inside.
Moving deeper inside the school. There was even less left to see here. It was completely dark and almost everything had been removed.
The floor has been made of ceramic tiles. The corridor has been very red.
A room, but the same theme continues. There is very little left.
This was as far as we went, and I believe that this is the school canteen. First of all the place was dark and not very interesting. Secondly I didn’t feel comfortable hanging around a demolition site because of my job.
So heading back towards the lobby. The main entrance is up front, the gym to the left.
That’s a lot of wood.
The main stairway of the school. However we had seen enough.
So back through the gym and out we went. The school was demolished that spring.
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