234 Comments Posted by rich_edwards79

The penthouse suite lol...

That's so freaky. I'm just amazed it wasn't on a wall in Pennhurst.

And following on from the above comment, by the modern miracle known as the World Wide Web I just found a website devoted to the place! Although it's in even worse shape now than when I last saw it, even the Dolphin Holiday Village will live on in cyberspace... the sun will always shine on a blue ocean and chalets freshly painted for the new season, the lawns will forever be as neatly mowed as they were when I was seven years old...

http://www.pontinsdolphin.4t.com/

Come back in a few weeks and it'll just be a little pile of bones...

It just looks like a regular hospital bed that's been raised fully at both ends. I doubt if both the leg and head supports would have been extended at the same time when it was occupied, and the lack of a mattress makes it look pretty weird too.

You can see the handles that are connected to a long pole with a thread on the end... before the days of hydraulics and power assistance I suspect (poor nurses!)

The metalwork nearest the camera does look scarily like stirrups... but I think they're just mounts for the wooden baseboard which has fallen off.

Sorry to be a kill-joy lol!

Oh this could be so many things besides the alien teleportation device which immediately comes to mind. It makes me think 'nightclub' for some reason lol! When Motts has finished meditating he can get on up and strut his stuff on the dancefloor....

That or a jacuzzi on the Poseidon XD

I wonder what purpose it actually served?

In some ways Witkin's work is comparable to Damien Hurst and others in the pickled cow business... art to shock, for the sake of it in many cases. Witkin's stuff is actually quite clever in some instances but unneccessarily icky in many more. IMO his best work is the photoshopped images involving live (hence consenting) people not the charnel-house, gut-churning yuckiness... However unlike Hurst Witkin actually seems to have a talent...

Ok I'll shut up and stop trying to be an amateur art critic now ;-D

Yeah, architecturally it reminds me very much of a place called the 'Holiday Motel' in Torquay where we stayed a couple of times when I was but a nipper. Similar 1960s architecture, leaky flat roofs, flat-pack cardboard furniture, horrid colours. It too was 'minging' (as we say in England!) and it too died lol...

The neon light fitting is kinda cool come to think of it...

...and the chairs RULE.

As I said, this was a freighter (at a guess) which was so badly damaged in a fire that it was uneconomic to repair (though that isn't always the case with ships that burn). On the other hand, some of the tugs, ferries and WWII boats in this yard don't look that badly damaged (prior to sitting in the sludge for 40 years that is!) and it surprises me that they aren't still in use or at least mothballed - boats (especially well-built steel ones like these) surely don't come cheap...

Yeah zeezyx, a real des-res if you fancy living surrounded by stinking, sludgy water in one of the most polluted places on earth! And I really wouldn't relish the prospect of spending a night surrounded by these dead, decaying hulks looming out of the darkness at every turn! The sounds would scare me silly... the gurgling and groaning as the advancing tide slowly fills the lower decks with water for the thousandth time, the creaking of rotted hulls, cabin doors banging in the wind. Freakier than any haunted house...

That said, there are rumours that a lone hermit lives (or lived) on the Duke of Lancaster, the remains of a beached liner on the Welsh coast. That is what you might call 'extreme squatting'...

Ummm... Chey haven't you heard of pleading not guilty on grounds of insanity? 'Diminished responsibility' (as it's called here in the UK) is a valid defence against a murder conviction. Someone who has committed a crime without being aware of their actions or their consequences isn't sentenced for murder - as a homicide conviction requires some evidence of intent.

There's a mental hospital here called Broadmoor - a high-security institution / jail - which is full of this kind of killers.

Thanks for that link Jerry! That is a real tragedy - a sad end for one of the queens of the Atlantic. Her sister ship the SS United States is apparently in slightly better condition (ie still afloat) but is also a derelict hulk - at Philadelpia I believe.

There's an interesting 'wreck' in North Wales, UK 'The Duke Of Lancaster' also marooned on a remote beach and facing an uncertain future. There are rumours that someone lives on board (the owner?) and more than one would-be explorer has been chased off the ship. It's a very surreal sight.

http://www.merseyshipp ... ancaster020905.htm

Hahaha Barry that is a rather good point hou make there (slaps head in frustration!)

Sadly with every stupid shortsighted housing boom the list of beautiful buildings grows shorter... we are in the grip of a property speculation bubble in the UK which has led to 15,000 new apartments being constructed in my city in the last five years. Most of them are too small to live in comfortably, priced too high for the young city workers and professionals for whom they were intended, andmany beautiful buildings have been destroyed or disfigured in the process. Most of them are owned by investment companies who sell them on for crazy profit.

In ten years time I wonder if some of them will be demolished already and others, the subjects of urban exploration websites?