Back in September 2003 Stoop & myself were chatting and discovered that totally independantly of each
other we had, since childhood, developed an interest in exploring drains. Considering that three years later
there's under ten dedicated UK drain explorers, we were pretty fortunate to be friends and drainers alike!
So in October 2003 after a trip to the local councils technical dept we hit up our first joint drain exploration
and so began the story of sub-urban.
Our early drains were all mighty small and pretty uninteresting by our standards today, but they're significant.
We knew nothing about Urban Exploring, UE, Urbex, Urban Adventure, whatever you care to term it, we just went out to
explore some drains. We thought it might be cool to get some pictures in the process and so borrowed a digital camera,
an impressive 1.3 Megapixel beastie with a maximum exposure of 1/2 second. But the quality of the pictures was
unimportant, we just thought it'd be cool to have some pictures to look back on. The following month, Nov 2003, we
decided to put our exploring trips online, still only taking pictures to accompany our texts rather than for
any creative/artistic purpose. Exploring was and remains the focus of our trips, illustrated by the fact that Stoop,
who is a photographer by profession, only started to take his camera along to better capture the places we explore
in late 2005.
So here are those select few images from our first joint explorations, all equally unspectacular in content, but
an important part of our exploring history. We all started somewhere . . .
