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St Josephs Seminary - May - 2015 PIC HEAVY cus i love wood!! | Oblivion State Urban Exploration

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St Josephs Seminary - May - 2015 PIC HEAVY cus i love wood!!

Merryprankster

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BEEP BEEP tour bus coming through!

Yeah its been a touristy weekend, never bumped into another explorer until this weekend and bumped into other explorers at two separate locations in one day! To be honest though i couldnt give a sheet, i've wanted to see Joe's for a long time and it was bloody ace so dont care if every man and his dogs, grannies, aunties, budgeys, brothers, mothers, lovers has been through here, i had a good time, took some alreet photos and got wood for some wood, good day in my books!- and yeah i know pretty much every photo in my set will have been taken by someone else before but hopefully a few of them are at an angle half a degree or two different from the rest! Im surprised there aren't little foot prints painted on the floor and signs saying, stand here, point camera there! anymahoo, good evenin explorers, how are we all? hope everyones been getting some good exploring in over the weekend, must say ive had a great weekend up north, St Joeys (seminary, not the orphanage), walkleys clog museum and blue church. Joes was amazing, a wood lovers wet dream, walkleys was just bloody fun, hardly a shining beacon of beauty and decay dancing around each other and conjuring up emotionally evocative scenes of lost moments frozen in time - nah bollocks to that shit, walkleys is just good ol fashioned, peter pan, never gona grow up, big kid fun, didn't think much of blue church to be fair, bit too far gone now if you ask me. Ageing/decaying has given way too plain old trashed now unfortunately. Ill fire up reports for walkleys and joes but hardly think the church is worth it, only took about 4 shots in there.

moving swiftly onwards - the explore

Oh my Cheesus christ, that noise... those of you who have been will know what im on about, that noise is HORRIFIC, i swear i could here it when i got back to worcs later that night, anyone thinking of going-ear plugs, big massive ear plugs. Im surprised the local explorer who showed us around has got any ears left!

first stop was the chapel, awesome timber frame roof in this place with absolutely beautiful hammer trusses, luckily someone previous to us had covered one of the main PIRs so we didn't have to suffer through that bloody noise again, though unfortunately we would be hearing it again shortly! we spent a bit of time in chapel though i wasn't happy with most the photos i took, bar the one beneath that is, just about the only alright shot i got in there to be fair.

after that we had a wander around the ground floor whilst it was still early, took in some nice big rooms, bit of ceiling porn and a bit of corridor porn, whilst downstairs we headed over to the world famous sinks, like i said earlier, we've all seen them before but here they are again :D after the sinks we headed upwards and to be honest cant really remember what order the explore went in after that! at one point we were on the roof, at one point i saw a dead squirrel, at one point i lost everyone, at one point people were getting spun around washing machines...which was later described as epic... never have i heard the words epic and washing machine in the same sentence, it didn't look very epic, the parma ham i was tucking into whilst this was going on however... :p To be fair this is a big place you could wonder around here for days! Ill give you some token gesture copy n paste history and then let the pics speak for themselves in terms of the explore - a pictures worth a thousands words n all that! oh yeah, decay wise joes has got a nice mix, fairly fresh looking unscathed parts right through to the odd buggered floor, some mouldy walls, fungus looking stuff in places, mossy floors in places, plants growing places they shouldn't be, all nice lovely stuff (y) (y)

Bit of History

History

St Joseph's College, Upholland is a Former Roman Catholic seminary, situated at Walthew Park, Upholland, Lancashire, England. The foundation of the large building was laid in April 1880 and college was opened in 1883. The buildings have recently been deconsecrated.

St Joseph's College was founded in 1880 by Bishop Bernard O'Reilly to be the Seminary serving the North West of England. The college was formally opened in 1883 and was situated in Walthew Park, Upholland, the geographic centre of the Diocese of Liverpool.

The first Junior Seminary of the Diocese was founded at St Edward's College in 1842 as a Catholic 'classical and commercial school' under the direction of the secular clergy and was established in Domingo House, a mansion in Everton. Its President for the next forty years was to be Monsignor Provost John Henry Fisher. When the Junior Seminarians moved to St Joseph's the school was taken over by the Christian Brothers (who also ran St John Rigby College in nearby Orrell) and continues to this day and now serves as the Liverpool Cathedral Choir School. In recognition of the heritage owed to St Edward's College one of the two chapels at Upholland was consecrated as the St Edward the Confessor Chapel.

Along with the other main seminary in the north of England, Ushaw candidates for the priesthood studied and were ordained at the college. Up until the second Vatican Council boys as young as 11 years of age entered the Junior Seminary before progressing to the senior Seminary at 18. In 1972 following the changes of Vatican 2 the two junior seminaries of St Joseph's and Ushaw merged at Upholland, and in 1975, with declining numbers of men from Ireland offering themselves for the (now) Archdiocese of Liverpool the Senior seminary moved to Ushaw. St Joseph's continued to offer boarding school education for boys considering a vocation until 1987.

Following the end of the seminary training and boarding education St Joseph's became home to the Northern Institute and was used as a retreat and conference centre for the Archdiocese under the leadership of Msgr John Devine.

The election of Archbishop Patrick Kelly saw the controversial decision to close St Joseph's altogether and the property was sold to Anglo International who instructed AEW Architects for the conversion of the Grade 2 listed RC Seminary to 92 apartments, with 220 new build enabling units. The major controversies of the decision were the ongoing financial viability of St Joseph's (it had just started to make a small surplus under Devine's management) and the sale and disposal of the art and artefacts in the college, much of which had been donated by various parishes and people of the Archdiocese who were not offered their donations back.

And here is some picturephotos

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you know em-you love em!! ladies and gentlemens its joes sinks, lets have a round of applause for joes sinks!!-its just a row of sinks... thanks to facebook i think i've seen more of these sinks than i have my own bloody sink! :p i dunno, its an alright shot but not enough wood about for my liking!

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need to learn how to deal with blown out windows- any tips welcome!

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tried to recreate my sandwell college pic - not even close!

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Thanks for looking guys, hope you enjoyed yet ANOTHER set from St Joes, it really is an awesome place. :cool: :D

 
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Urbexbandoned

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Love the title, that's a bit of me and secondly love the write up. Haha!! Great pics as always mate, love that last reflective one!!

Keep them coming, am enjoying your reports!

:comp

 

skeleton key

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Beep Beep Hahaha Love it :D

A cracking set and write up Jake :p

Good to see and thanks for sharing (y)

 

The_Raw

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Great pics there mate. Not sure if you've noticed but i think you may have got a couple of little tears on the knees of your jeans :lol:

 

PROJ3CTM4YH3M

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Really nice report mate! that reflection shot is epic! Also cool bumping into you ;)

 

Merryprankster

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Really nice report mate! that reflection shot is epic! Also cool bumping into you ;)
cheers pal, yeah reflection shots are nearly always a winner! good to meet you to mate (y)

 

Merryprankster

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thanks all for the advice and the positive vibes, really loved this place, kind of place id like to do on my own tbh, because there was quite a few of us felt a little bit rushed, not complaining though but i reckon i could easily spend a full day if not more in here!!

oh yeah there was this one other photo i took too... now i haven't the foggiest idea who this so called "damien" character might be but i'm really chuffed that he isn't scared of announcing his sexuality to the world by writing it in dust on a mirror in an abandoned seminary, i mean fair play to the guy he must be a really brave little solider coming out the closet like that... i wonder if he likes wearing womens clothes in derelict buildings aswell... guess we'll just never know!

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jones-y-gog

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Re. blown windows - sometimes the regular 3 shot bracketing still can't deal with really contrasty situations so....presuming you're set up on a tripod take the 3 shots as usual then switch to full manual mode. Make sure you keep the same f-stop then twiddle the dial to about 5 times under-exposed (a much faster shutter speed). What you'll have is a very dark pic but the detail through the window should be ok. You can then load any number of images into Photomatix - you could have 6 or more. If you've got a later version you can try out the different presets, some work better than others :)

Hope this makes sense and have fun experimenting!!

 

mookster

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Words can't describe how badly I need to see this place. Why does it have to be so far away?

 

hamtagger

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It really is an epic place this one and you've got a belter of a set of pictures. Need to get my hole back up there soon :D

Oh, and some of your pics have disappeared mate?

 
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