This is one of my favorite locations from our 2024 summer trip - a small power plant in an abandoned textile factory somewhere in France.
The story goes something like this - one day I was browsing Flickr to see what popped up on my feed and what I could try to find and I saw a photo from this power plant. The color scheme in the turbine hall was borderline perfect, but what really caught my eye were these atypical turbines. They looked like nothing I've ever seen before. I asked my friends if they - perschlaps - knew anything about it, but all my inquiries were unsuccessful. To be fair, I asked my Czech friends I usually go on urbex trips with, so maybe my expectations were misplaced in the first place. They saw the photos too - we generally like the same kind of stuff and follow the same people - but had no idea where it was, apart from "somewhere in France", which one could figure out from the large "Sautter-Harlé Paris" on the turbine. They did promise to ask around, and so I left it at that, not expecting much. Turned out someone knew the location, albeit very approximately. And by approximately, I mean an area of I'd say 10 000 square kilometers, maybe a bit more. Very much a needle-in-a-haystack situation. That guy already spent tens of hours trying to find it and gave up, but I thought that I might as well try it - turned out it was the right call, sort of. The only thing to go by was the jagged roof and the rough size of the turbine hall. When I occasionally need to do a thorough sweep of an area, I take a screenshot of the map and cross out pieces of it in MS paint. I found it after few hours and it turned out to be few kilometers outside the area I was told it should be in. I stumbled upon it by accident because I got a bit confused about where exactly my area of interest ended. Saw the roof, thought it was worth checking out a bit more, and managed to reference all the doors and windows from the photos with google earth imagery. Lucky coincidences right? As it turned out, some guy leaked the city in a Facebook group few hours after I found it. We of course included it in our itinerary for the trip and marked it as high priority.
The location has bit of a history, but it is scattered around and I couldn't find anything comprehensive. The power plant is a new-ish addition to an old textile factory. The factory dates back to the 18th century when it was founded. At the end of the 18th century, the company was sold to two men, but one of them died in the 19th century and the company came under the ownership of his partner. His family maintained control over the company until the 1950s, when the family died out without anyone to inherit the company. It changed hands in the 1990s and 2000s and later declared bankruptcy. It only had few dozen employees at that point, a stark difference from its glorious past. The company owned at least three factory sites in the same city. The one we visited was to my knowledge the main one, but there is one which is still operational (someone bought part of the insolvent company and produces stuff under its name) and one which relatively recently went into demolition.
For us, the interesting thing was the power plant. Even ignoring the turbines, it was unusual all around. It looked like some sort of patchwork. The turbine hall was placed between the chimney and the boilerhouse - weird. The exhaust pipes were bolted to the roof of the turbine hall so that they could reach the chimney from the top of the boilerhouse. That doesn't make much sense now, does it? Some doors in the turbine hall were sealed off with cinderblock. The whole thing was weird, so we were excited to a) see the power plant and b) sniff around a bit to see if there was anything left from the textile factory. Spoiler alert - we found stuff, but I'll keep the textile factory for another report.
Now, finally, the explore. It was peak summer temperature, so every second outside was painful and every second in the sun was hell. I generously applied sunscreen and we set out from the parking spot. The entry was a bit tedious but overall simple. We quickly found out that the area was semi-active, with the activity seemingly concentrated on the eastern side of the factory. To give you some idea of the layout, you can imagine a rectangle with the longer side going east-to-west. The power plant was basically right in the middle of the rectangle. There were two large factory buildings - one which took up the eastern half of the rectangle, and one wich took up the western half. A gravel road ran around the eastern building, and - more importantly - it ran next to the power plant from south to north. Good news was that it was fairly quiet around the power plant. The bad news was that occasionally and with little warning a truck drove by the power plant. Not catastrophic news by any means; at most an incovenience. And an inconvenience was definitely not a showstopper. So we soldiered on through the overgrowth and managed to find a way in. The insides were a slight disappointment. Don't get me wrong - it was a superb place to visit, but the turbine hall and control room were sadly a bit scuffed when we got there. The color scheme in the turbine hall was very pleasant - grey walls and slight variations of blue on the turbines, roof beams and switching equipment. The only irritating thing was the yellow paint on some of the walls. The boilerhouse is often an afterthought, but this one was one of the best I've seen so far. It had some clear and some blue-tinted windows, which created a great mix of colors in the dark boilerhouse. The control room was placed between the boilerhouse and turbine hall, and someone thought that an angled window looking into the boilerhouse would be a nice feature - kudos to the person who thought of that, it looks great.
I'd give it a solid 11/10, would visit again!
Thanks for reading!
The story goes something like this - one day I was browsing Flickr to see what popped up on my feed and what I could try to find and I saw a photo from this power plant. The color scheme in the turbine hall was borderline perfect, but what really caught my eye were these atypical turbines. They looked like nothing I've ever seen before. I asked my friends if they - perschlaps - knew anything about it, but all my inquiries were unsuccessful. To be fair, I asked my Czech friends I usually go on urbex trips with, so maybe my expectations were misplaced in the first place. They saw the photos too - we generally like the same kind of stuff and follow the same people - but had no idea where it was, apart from "somewhere in France", which one could figure out from the large "Sautter-Harlé Paris" on the turbine. They did promise to ask around, and so I left it at that, not expecting much. Turned out someone knew the location, albeit very approximately. And by approximately, I mean an area of I'd say 10 000 square kilometers, maybe a bit more. Very much a needle-in-a-haystack situation. That guy already spent tens of hours trying to find it and gave up, but I thought that I might as well try it - turned out it was the right call, sort of. The only thing to go by was the jagged roof and the rough size of the turbine hall. When I occasionally need to do a thorough sweep of an area, I take a screenshot of the map and cross out pieces of it in MS paint. I found it after few hours and it turned out to be few kilometers outside the area I was told it should be in. I stumbled upon it by accident because I got a bit confused about where exactly my area of interest ended. Saw the roof, thought it was worth checking out a bit more, and managed to reference all the doors and windows from the photos with google earth imagery. Lucky coincidences right? As it turned out, some guy leaked the city in a Facebook group few hours after I found it. We of course included it in our itinerary for the trip and marked it as high priority.
The location has bit of a history, but it is scattered around and I couldn't find anything comprehensive. The power plant is a new-ish addition to an old textile factory. The factory dates back to the 18th century when it was founded. At the end of the 18th century, the company was sold to two men, but one of them died in the 19th century and the company came under the ownership of his partner. His family maintained control over the company until the 1950s, when the family died out without anyone to inherit the company. It changed hands in the 1990s and 2000s and later declared bankruptcy. It only had few dozen employees at that point, a stark difference from its glorious past. The company owned at least three factory sites in the same city. The one we visited was to my knowledge the main one, but there is one which is still operational (someone bought part of the insolvent company and produces stuff under its name) and one which relatively recently went into demolition.
For us, the interesting thing was the power plant. Even ignoring the turbines, it was unusual all around. It looked like some sort of patchwork. The turbine hall was placed between the chimney and the boilerhouse - weird. The exhaust pipes were bolted to the roof of the turbine hall so that they could reach the chimney from the top of the boilerhouse. That doesn't make much sense now, does it? Some doors in the turbine hall were sealed off with cinderblock. The whole thing was weird, so we were excited to a) see the power plant and b) sniff around a bit to see if there was anything left from the textile factory. Spoiler alert - we found stuff, but I'll keep the textile factory for another report.
Now, finally, the explore. It was peak summer temperature, so every second outside was painful and every second in the sun was hell. I generously applied sunscreen and we set out from the parking spot. The entry was a bit tedious but overall simple. We quickly found out that the area was semi-active, with the activity seemingly concentrated on the eastern side of the factory. To give you some idea of the layout, you can imagine a rectangle with the longer side going east-to-west. The power plant was basically right in the middle of the rectangle. There were two large factory buildings - one which took up the eastern half of the rectangle, and one wich took up the western half. A gravel road ran around the eastern building, and - more importantly - it ran next to the power plant from south to north. Good news was that it was fairly quiet around the power plant. The bad news was that occasionally and with little warning a truck drove by the power plant. Not catastrophic news by any means; at most an incovenience. And an inconvenience was definitely not a showstopper. So we soldiered on through the overgrowth and managed to find a way in. The insides were a slight disappointment. Don't get me wrong - it was a superb place to visit, but the turbine hall and control room were sadly a bit scuffed when we got there. The color scheme in the turbine hall was very pleasant - grey walls and slight variations of blue on the turbines, roof beams and switching equipment. The only irritating thing was the yellow paint on some of the walls. The boilerhouse is often an afterthought, but this one was one of the best I've seen so far. It had some clear and some blue-tinted windows, which created a great mix of colors in the dark boilerhouse. The control room was placed between the boilerhouse and turbine hall, and someone thought that an angled window looking into the boilerhouse would be a nice feature - kudos to the person who thought of that, it looks great.
I'd give it a solid 11/10, would visit again!
Thanks for reading!
