The weekend prior saw my wife fly out to Poland with her choir so I was left at home with plans to go for a road trip to Scotland to visit some examples of Brutalism and also my brother and his family in Glasgow.
Jumping in the Skoda Octavia I set the sat nav for the day’s second attraction knowing full well that I would be travelling past the first.
Lancaster Services
Also known as Forton Services this service station requires a pull off from the M6 at J33 going Northwards and opened in 1965. It’s now unused after not meeting fire regulations in 1989 and became grade II listed in 2012. The architects were T.P.Bennett and Son and this was their second motorway services after completing Strensham previously, where none of the original buildings remain. The main interest to me is the Pennine Tower that housed a classy restaurant and a sun deck, but this is no longer in use, so I would be using the drone to capture a few images of the tower and the surrounding services. There were some nice angles to capture photos of, and to see the top from the air was also cool. Without getting too close I could see through the windows some of the old restaurant fittings, but the last thing I wanted to do was to stuff my Mini 4 Pro into the services and lose it.
St Peter’s Seminary
Situated in Cardross near Glasgow and Dumbarton this is the site of an old college for priests in the Roman Catholic religion. It opened in 1966 and stopped being used for this purpose in 1980 when the site changed into a drug rehabilitation centre and since 1987 it has been abandoned, falling further into ruin with every passing year. Despite being considered as Scotlands Greatest Post-War Modern building it has been left to decay, although being given to the Kilmahew Education Trust it has failed to find another use, apart from a short spell as an art installation.
I parked on Barrs Road and then went for a walk up the lane to see the building that I’ve read about many times. I walked along with an older couple for a short while who told me that they remember it being an active college and that it was sad how it has been left to graffiti artists and people up to no good. Nearer the Seminary you cross the golf course but all of the gates are unlocked and wide open, closer still there is a bridge that permits a steep fall if not paying attention but the grounds of the concrete installation are full of yew trees and Rhododendron plants currently in full pink bloom.
As the path opened up the building came into view with four tubular buildings stuck on the face of it, it looks vaguely like a multi-storey car park with all of the windows and details missing but the faces are covered in pebble dashed style concrete. Each floor as it goes up is narrower than the one beneath, giving it a ziggurat style appearance and almost every flat face is covered in spray paint from a rattle can or two.
I found the stairs to the upper floors and they were fenced in but a couple of fence verticals have been removed so I was able to squeeze in easily enough. From here it was up the concrete stairs and then an investigation of the floors from the top to the bottom. Many of the vaulted ceilings are still there in between the joists but I tapped my foot on one or two and the insulation still on there offered little in the way of confidence that it would keep me from falling to terrific injuries, so I kept off these and walked only on the solid concrete beams and joists as well as the tiled areas. On the top floor and the second from top there were a couple of areas on the one side of the structure that had tiled rooms with red tiles on the floor and originally white, now painted over, tiles on the walls. You could see the waste outlets that the two toilets per floor led into and the shower tray that reminded me of the old days of going swimming with school and having to walk through the disinfectant pool part.
Up on the top floor, I didn’t go onto the top-most roof, you could see across the countryside to the nearby golf course and the river beyond which lent it a wonderfully peaceful air. As I was strolling around on the top floors I heard a couple of people enter the structure at ground level and so they weren’t surprised later I said a quick hello to them. There would be a few people there over the course of my 3.5 hour visit, mostly young people out for a quiet smoke of the a spliff or two, a couple of people out looking for a filming location for a creature film, and a couple out for a quick walk around. There was also another person about my age who was out looking for sights on her 100 list, this happened to be one of them and she was happy that it was decidedly spooky.
I was making images on my Canon R5 MkII with the 24-70mm lens attached as well as my Zenza Bronica ETRS 645 medium format film camera. I had popped into here a Kodak Portra 400 roll of 120 film and shot through this on the upper floors where the light was capturing the colourful scenery of the trees around and the spray painted walls. On the ground floor I had changed to a roll of Kodak Tri-X 400 and blasted through these. I was using the prism metering attachment on the top of the camera, set to the correct ISO, and it aligned with what my LUX app was suggesting on the phone so I continued to trust it. I had it mounted on my K&F Concept tripod which provided a solid base for the camera and was operating the shutter using a short shutter release cable. After the second shot I moved location and when I went to take the third photo I noticed that the finger rest on the end of the cable had fell off so for the remainder of the shots I had to press the sharper threaded end of the release. Bugger. I did have a quick look amongst the detritus of the short walk from one location to another but never spotted it.
As I made my way down to the ground floor I was taking pictures of all sorts of angles, looking down, looking up, looking outwards, looking inwards and even a few detail shots of abstract parts of the scene. Once on the ground floor I put my film camera away and saved the other two rolls of film in case I needed them in the next few days. I continued to roam with the R5 and then once I’d completed a good walk around I headed out to begin using the drone. I warned the youth on the top floor that I’d be flying the drone but not spying on them, they were chatty with me before so I wasn’t overly concerned.
With the amount of trees and greenery surrounding this Brutalist wonder I was having to be exceptionally careful and was not able to shoot many images face on to the building as the nature was too close and I risked crashing again.. After a good number of shots and a couple of short videos I landed and packed up to get going.
It still amazes me that the whole cantilever nature of the structure is held up on the legs in the centre of the building and that there is little other support throughout the whole place. It must be a cleverly calculated amount of structural performance statistics that has kept this place stood upright through fire and other damage over the last six decades.
Movie Time
Back to the car I headed to my hotel and the car park that had a deal with Ibis for a cheaper rate. I got into the city centre and parked at the Glasshouse NCP car park then grabbed all of my gear and headed off to the Ibis Styles near George Square. Once checked in and up in the room I put my feet up and watched a bit of news before enacting the next part of my plan. A visit to the cinema to see the new Star Wars film, Mandalorian and Grogu, which was on at the VUE in St Enoch’s Shopping Centre at 21:30hrs. Coming out of the cinema at just after midnight I felt a bit vulnerable on the streets, I didn’t have my camera with me but still felt like a mugging victim in waiting. There were few people around and the only categories of people I saw were young revelers on the way to the next bar, the Deliveroo and just eat couriers on their scooters and bikes, and finally the dodgy looking geezers and girls shouting abuse at each other across the road. I headed back to the hotel ahead of the next day’s activities.
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