So i started writing this a few months ago but ran out of time. In the current situation time is hardly a constraint for alot of us tho so i thought id make the effort to finish. Maybe some of you are in the same boat and can take the time to do some decent reports too. I know theres alot out there still to be documented properly!
A few weeks ago I finally made my latest (and probably last) trip down to the forests of fleet to take a very much overdue look at the anechoic chamber, the last remaining 'original' test cell on the once vast urbex playground that most people simply know as 'Pyestock'. Big thanks to @Olkka for holding my hand that evening! Truth be told ive been meaning to visit the chamber for years now, way before it hit the urbex tourist trail in fact! This wasn't because i was dying to see what was inside so much but because i have had a hankering to write more the about the NGTE for a good while now and it seemed wrong to do this without fully completing my personal mission first! When we created the 'Noteworthy' section on 28days a number of years ago i was very keen to find a Pyestock report to drop in there to showcase what has to be one of the greatest explores to have existed in our 15+ year lifespan. Trouble is there just isn't that many reports that fit the bill! Theres a few from later in its lifetime but although these tend to have nice pictures, they fail to tell the actual story of the exploring, at least the exploring as it was back in late 06 early 07 when the place was first coming to light.. In the end we added my first report from the site, a 9 hour epic and one of the first to show the majority of the site online, however by 2020s standards its an absolute dog of a report that lacks real context now the vast majority of explorers from that time are retired and gone! This thread then is a retrospective look back on that day with some photographic help from of some of my subsequent explores of the NGTE before i get to old an decrepit to remember how it all went down!
Dont expect this to be an in depth technical review of the site, if you want that id recommend Simon Cornwells www.ngte.co.uk. Simon was around pyestock in the early days, probably before we were in fact and has rightfully put one hell of an effort into documenting the site and what it accomplished over the years. For purposes of this thread all you really need to know is the following..
The NGTE was a government establishment set up in the 1950s to test gas turbine engines (including the variants more commonly known as the 'Jet' engine.) These engines were obviously big news in the early days of the cold war so a lot of investment was ploughed into their development and the Pyestock site increased in size massively from the early 50s through tho the late 60s. The majority of the site is devoted to a number of test 'cells'. These were basically wind tunnels where engines cold be tested in the same conditions that they would find flying at high speed and at high altitude. This means moving a massive amount of air, fast, at high (or more accurately low) pressure, in various temperatures and humidities to simulate what engines would experience hanging off the wing of a plane in a controlled environment.. no mean feat!
The first i heard of Pyestock was in late 2006 when a report popped up on 28dl from some local guys who had been. They had gained access to a few parts of the site, most notably the 'air house' that we will cover shortly. It was clear it was a special place from just a few photos but looking back its amazing just how lazy and slow the response of the exploring world was. Nowadays car keys would have been jangling in more or less everyone's pockets and it would have been all over insta and the daily mail within hours. That just wasn't how it was back then tho! A few months went by, Christmas came and went and only a few more reports surfaced, all of the same bits, Air House, Cell 4, No. 10 Exhuaster.. Personally, at the time, i was at a point in my exploring 'career' if you like where id just started to really spread my wings and head out of my local area to some of the big name asylums and more epic sites further a field than comfortable hours drive. Originally our interest in a trip to Pyestock was very much a touristy one. I had a plan to head down for a few hours then move on to some other local haunts like CMH and Park Prewitt. It didn't quite work out that way tho!
Im going to try and do this in the order we did it that day, starting at the biggest building on site, the 'Air House'.
Air house as we approched
Myself and my exploring partner of the time 'Dab' had made an early start and made good time down to fleet arriving around 8am for sunrise. As i remember it we just dumped the car by the side of the road and wandered through the woods until we found a fence. Compared with most explores id done before this place initially seemed a little dodgy. It very much had an air of the military government establishment about it, somewhere you wouldn't want to be caught! We hadn't done any research, just rocked up one day after seeing a few photos online. Later we would find that we had little to worry about, security was non-existent for at least a year after Pyestock hit the big time but we didn't know that on the first tentative approach! I seem to remember scaling the high chain link fence only to then walk a few yards on the inside and find a big hole in it just a little further along. We were fairly amateurish back then for sure! The obvious place to head was the big building, what turned out to be the Air House. We had seen plenty of photos from in here. Its basically a giant compressor house, a row of 8 electrically powered and steam started compressors with 3 stages of compressor (in white) a large GEC motor providing most of the power and a small steam turbine to start the things up! I cant say i really understood that at the time tho! to me, never having set foot in anything like this before, no power stations or turbine halls at all, it was just bloody epic!
Compressors in early 2007
Same view in 2010
Again 2007
2010, GEC plates long gone
Controls
Condensers
Adjacent to the main hall we found our first control room, this became a theme for the day, hunt the control room, they were everywhere with their 50s green panels and endless knobs an twiddly bits. There wasn't a whole lot more too the building to be honest. A stack of silencer chimneys down one side and a bunch of iconic blue pipes exiting from each side. We spent about an hour in there before moving on and meeting up with another two of our mates who had come down from Colchester a little late.
Control Room 2007
Trashed by 2010
Close up of the controls, i dont appear to have a shot of the pull out syncroscope, a nice feature!
Behind the panels
A guest list from late 2007. I wonder how many people off here even still explore? Cant be many!
Next on the tourists agenda was a look at some of the weird blue pipe things we had passed on the way in. This turned out to be 'Cell 3 West' one of the last test cells built on the site to test new fangled 'bypass jets', the kind of thing you see mounted on the side of todays airliners. These engines are kind of like a jet engine attached to a propeller so they move a lot more air than a normal jet does. They are also much bigger and this was the main reason this larger cell was constructed back in 1969. On the day it was just that tho, a big blue pipe thing with a white mouth that we climbed inside and didn't really find much to shout about. It had a control room which we didn't venture inside on our first trip but on a later trip we found it to be fairly modernised and didn't even bother to get the camera out in the dark.
Under the air house intake mains
Cell 3 West
The other end
Inside
Next up was a building known as 'Number 10 Exhauster' Another later addition to the site this was basically added as the 8 compressor sets in the air house could no longer keep up with demand. It had a nice little control desk and a spare turbine cowling i would have loved to have made into a garden shed! Incidentally there was also a Number 9 Exhauster on site too but we didn't stumble across this until much later. In fact i didnt look at it properly until my last pre-demolition trip in 2010. The building it was in was dark... We didn't even bother to go in it for 4 years #noobs..
No. 10 Exhauster intake main
The Exhauster
No.10 Control Desk
Close up of some controls
No.9 Exhauster
Partially stripped (2010)
Lesser Spotted No. 9 Control Room
Motor control
An intake nozzle that would have been fitted to engines on test.
A few weeks ago I finally made my latest (and probably last) trip down to the forests of fleet to take a very much overdue look at the anechoic chamber, the last remaining 'original' test cell on the once vast urbex playground that most people simply know as 'Pyestock'. Big thanks to @Olkka for holding my hand that evening! Truth be told ive been meaning to visit the chamber for years now, way before it hit the urbex tourist trail in fact! This wasn't because i was dying to see what was inside so much but because i have had a hankering to write more the about the NGTE for a good while now and it seemed wrong to do this without fully completing my personal mission first! When we created the 'Noteworthy' section on 28days a number of years ago i was very keen to find a Pyestock report to drop in there to showcase what has to be one of the greatest explores to have existed in our 15+ year lifespan. Trouble is there just isn't that many reports that fit the bill! Theres a few from later in its lifetime but although these tend to have nice pictures, they fail to tell the actual story of the exploring, at least the exploring as it was back in late 06 early 07 when the place was first coming to light.. In the end we added my first report from the site, a 9 hour epic and one of the first to show the majority of the site online, however by 2020s standards its an absolute dog of a report that lacks real context now the vast majority of explorers from that time are retired and gone! This thread then is a retrospective look back on that day with some photographic help from of some of my subsequent explores of the NGTE before i get to old an decrepit to remember how it all went down!
Dont expect this to be an in depth technical review of the site, if you want that id recommend Simon Cornwells www.ngte.co.uk. Simon was around pyestock in the early days, probably before we were in fact and has rightfully put one hell of an effort into documenting the site and what it accomplished over the years. For purposes of this thread all you really need to know is the following..
The NGTE was a government establishment set up in the 1950s to test gas turbine engines (including the variants more commonly known as the 'Jet' engine.) These engines were obviously big news in the early days of the cold war so a lot of investment was ploughed into their development and the Pyestock site increased in size massively from the early 50s through tho the late 60s. The majority of the site is devoted to a number of test 'cells'. These were basically wind tunnels where engines cold be tested in the same conditions that they would find flying at high speed and at high altitude. This means moving a massive amount of air, fast, at high (or more accurately low) pressure, in various temperatures and humidities to simulate what engines would experience hanging off the wing of a plane in a controlled environment.. no mean feat!
The first i heard of Pyestock was in late 2006 when a report popped up on 28dl from some local guys who had been. They had gained access to a few parts of the site, most notably the 'air house' that we will cover shortly. It was clear it was a special place from just a few photos but looking back its amazing just how lazy and slow the response of the exploring world was. Nowadays car keys would have been jangling in more or less everyone's pockets and it would have been all over insta and the daily mail within hours. That just wasn't how it was back then tho! A few months went by, Christmas came and went and only a few more reports surfaced, all of the same bits, Air House, Cell 4, No. 10 Exhuaster.. Personally, at the time, i was at a point in my exploring 'career' if you like where id just started to really spread my wings and head out of my local area to some of the big name asylums and more epic sites further a field than comfortable hours drive. Originally our interest in a trip to Pyestock was very much a touristy one. I had a plan to head down for a few hours then move on to some other local haunts like CMH and Park Prewitt. It didn't quite work out that way tho!
Im going to try and do this in the order we did it that day, starting at the biggest building on site, the 'Air House'.
Air house as we approched
Myself and my exploring partner of the time 'Dab' had made an early start and made good time down to fleet arriving around 8am for sunrise. As i remember it we just dumped the car by the side of the road and wandered through the woods until we found a fence. Compared with most explores id done before this place initially seemed a little dodgy. It very much had an air of the military government establishment about it, somewhere you wouldn't want to be caught! We hadn't done any research, just rocked up one day after seeing a few photos online. Later we would find that we had little to worry about, security was non-existent for at least a year after Pyestock hit the big time but we didn't know that on the first tentative approach! I seem to remember scaling the high chain link fence only to then walk a few yards on the inside and find a big hole in it just a little further along. We were fairly amateurish back then for sure! The obvious place to head was the big building, what turned out to be the Air House. We had seen plenty of photos from in here. Its basically a giant compressor house, a row of 8 electrically powered and steam started compressors with 3 stages of compressor (in white) a large GEC motor providing most of the power and a small steam turbine to start the things up! I cant say i really understood that at the time tho! to me, never having set foot in anything like this before, no power stations or turbine halls at all, it was just bloody epic!
Compressors in early 2007
Same view in 2010
Again 2007
2010, GEC plates long gone
Controls
Condensers
Adjacent to the main hall we found our first control room, this became a theme for the day, hunt the control room, they were everywhere with their 50s green panels and endless knobs an twiddly bits. There wasn't a whole lot more too the building to be honest. A stack of silencer chimneys down one side and a bunch of iconic blue pipes exiting from each side. We spent about an hour in there before moving on and meeting up with another two of our mates who had come down from Colchester a little late.
Control Room 2007
Trashed by 2010
Close up of the controls, i dont appear to have a shot of the pull out syncroscope, a nice feature!
Behind the panels
A guest list from late 2007. I wonder how many people off here even still explore? Cant be many!
Next on the tourists agenda was a look at some of the weird blue pipe things we had passed on the way in. This turned out to be 'Cell 3 West' one of the last test cells built on the site to test new fangled 'bypass jets', the kind of thing you see mounted on the side of todays airliners. These engines are kind of like a jet engine attached to a propeller so they move a lot more air than a normal jet does. They are also much bigger and this was the main reason this larger cell was constructed back in 1969. On the day it was just that tho, a big blue pipe thing with a white mouth that we climbed inside and didn't really find much to shout about. It had a control room which we didn't venture inside on our first trip but on a later trip we found it to be fairly modernised and didn't even bother to get the camera out in the dark.
Under the air house intake mains
Cell 3 West
The other end
Inside
Next up was a building known as 'Number 10 Exhauster' Another later addition to the site this was basically added as the 8 compressor sets in the air house could no longer keep up with demand. It had a nice little control desk and a spare turbine cowling i would have loved to have made into a garden shed! Incidentally there was also a Number 9 Exhauster on site too but we didn't stumble across this until much later. In fact i didnt look at it properly until my last pre-demolition trip in 2010. The building it was in was dark... We didn't even bother to go in it for 4 years #noobs..
No. 10 Exhauster intake main
The Exhauster
No.10 Control Desk
Close up of some controls
No.9 Exhauster
Partially stripped (2010)
Lesser Spotted No. 9 Control Room
Motor control
An intake nozzle that would have been fitted to engines on test.
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Your not far wrong tho. Id be hard pushed to choose between this and Teeside steel as a second place based purely on what was there to find. Pyestocks big downfall in the exploring rankings has to be that it was just too easy tho. There was no challenge. All its other rivals like Bishopton or even Cane Hill were all tricky challenging explores and that made them better 'explores' if not better 'locations'..
