Interview with Steve Duncan: Urban Exploration Tips from a Real-World Explorer

🌍 The First Breath of Damp Stone

I stood waist-deep in cold, black water inside London’s disused Fleet River culvert—my headlamp beam trembling on wet brick arches, the smell of wet clay and centuries-old mortar thick in the air—when Steve Duncan crouched beside me and said, ‘This isn’t trespassing. It’s archaeology you can walk through.’ That sentence rewired how I understood cities—not as static backdrops for travel photos, but as layered, breathing systems built, buried, forgotten, and sometimes reclaimed. My interview with Steve Duncan urban explorer began not in a café or studio, but knee-deep in the city’s circulatory system, where every drip echoed like a clock ticking backward. If you’re considering urban exploration as part of your budget travel strategy, know this: it demands preparation, ethics, and humility—not gear or guts alone.

🗺️ The Setup: Why I Went Underground

It started with a £12 train ticket from Bristol to London Paddington and a notebook filled with questions I wasn’t sure anyone would answer. For months, I’d followed Steve’s work—not the viral ‘abandoned tunnel’ reels, but his academic writing on subterranean infrastructure, his TEDx talks on civic memory, and his quiet advocacy for public access to neglected infrastructure 1. I wasn’t chasing adrenaline. I was trying to solve a travel problem: how to experience a megacity like London without spending £45 on a West End show or £30 on a ‘hidden history’ walking tour that ended at a Starbucks. My budget was £40/day—including accommodation in a shared room near King’s Cross—and my goal was depth over breadth: one city, three days, zero tourist traps.

I’d mapped out alternatives: free museum days (Tate Modern, British Museum), self-guided walks along the Thames Path, even volunteering at a community garden in Peckham. But something felt missing—the sense of place beneath the pavement. So I emailed Steve on a whim, citing his 2019 paper on Victorian sewer access protocols and asking if he’d consider a brief conversation about how to approach infrastructure ethically. To my surprise, he replied within 48 hours: ‘Come Thursday. Meet me at the Fleet Street entrance to the old Fleet River conduit. Wear waterproof boots. No flash photography. Bring patience—not cameras.’

🌧️ The Turning Point: When the Map Failed

Thursday arrived grey and drizzly, the kind of London rain that soaks through layers without drama. I found the unmarked iron gate near St. Bride’s Church—just as Steve described—but the padlock was new, heavier, and bolted with a steel hasp I hadn’t anticipated. My printed map showed a service hatch; reality showed rusted bolts and a faint chalk ‘X’ scratched near the base—Steve’s marker, I realized too late. I waited 22 minutes, checking my phone (no signal), listening to rain drum on cobblestones, wondering if I’d misread the coordinates—or worse, misunderstood the invitation entirely.

Then, a figure in dark waxed cotton appeared, carrying a canvas satchel and a brass-handled torch. No greeting, just a nod and a key turning in the lock with practiced ease. ‘The map’s only half the story,’ he said, pushing the gate inward. ‘What matters is who maintains it, who inspects it, and whether they’ve changed the protocol since last month. Always check with Thames Water’s asset register before assuming access—even here.’ He didn’t say ‘I told you so,’ but the lesson landed: urban exploration isn’t about finding places—it’s about reading permission between the lines.

📸 The Discovery: Light, Sound, and Unseen Rules

Inside, the air dropped ten degrees instantly. My breath fogged. The torchlight caught algae slicks on curved brick walls, their surface veined with mineral deposits like fossilized rivers. Steve moved slowly, stopping often—not to pose, but to listen. ‘Hear that?’ he asked, holding up a hand. A low, resonant hum vibrated through the soles of my boots. ‘That’s the Victoria Line running two meters above us. Not noise—resonance. Infrastructure talks if you stop talking back.’

He pointed to a section where tiles had been replaced in the 1930s—smaller, paler, laid with tighter grout. ‘See the difference? That repair happened after the 1928 floods. They didn’t just patch it—they re-engineered flow dynamics.’ He ran fingers along a groove worn smooth by centuries of water. ‘This channel carried runoff from 300,000 people before the main sewers existed. Now it carries maybe 5% of its original volume—and yet, it still functions. That’s resilience most tourists never see.’

The emotional pivot came when we paused beneath a collapsed brick vault, its rubble stacked neatly to one side. ‘Council crew cleared this last year,’ Steve said quietly. ‘They logged it, photographed it, reported it—and then left the stones where they fell. Why? Because moving them might destabilize the layer above. So they chose observation over intervention. That’s the ethic: leave no trace, but also—leave no assumption.’ I’d come expecting adventure. Instead, I got humility—and a new definition of ‘access.’

🚌 The Journey Continues: From Tunnel to Transit

We surfaced near Blackfriars Bridge as dusk bled into indigo. Steve bought two cups of strong, sweet tea from a stall that had been there since the 1950s—‘same owner, same kettle,’ he noted—and we sat on damp stone steps watching commuters blur past under sodium lights. He spoke about how London’s Overground expansion had reopened disused viaducts—not as relics, but as active transport corridors. ‘Look at that arch,’ he said, nodding toward a brick curve lit by LED strips. ‘Built 1845. Closed 1965. Reopened 2010. The city doesn’t erase—it repurposes. Your job as a traveler isn’t to uncover secrets. It’s to notice the reuse.’

The next day, I walked the Parkland Walk—a disused railway line turned greenway—using Steve’s method: not just admiring the foxgloves, but tracing where rails had been removed, spotting original platform signage painted over but still legible beneath peeling paint, noting how drainage channels matched those in the Fleet culvert. I visited Crossness Pumping Station not for its ornate ironwork (though it stunned me), but to ask the volunteer docent: ‘What maintenance log entries changed most after the 2014 Thames Tideway upgrade?’ She pulled out a laminated sheet—real data, real process. That felt more valuable than any audio guide.

By Day Three, I’d shifted my entire itinerary. No more ‘top 10 hidden gems’ lists. Instead, I spent mornings at the London Metropolitan Archives, requesting digitized sewer inspection reports from 1902–1910. In the afternoon, I cycled the Grand Union Canal towpath, comparing lock mechanisms to photos Steve had shown me—spotting cast-iron replacements from the 1970s versus original 18th-century stonework. Budget travel, I realized, wasn’t about cutting corners. It was about redirecting attention—and time was the only currency that scaled.

💡 Reflection: What the City Taught Me About Myself

Before meeting Steve, I measured travel success by photos captured, landmarks ticked, Instagram likes accrued. After three days underground, atop viaducts, and inside archive stacks, I measured it by questions asked, assumptions revised, and silences held. I’d gone seeking tactics for cheap travel—and found a philosophy: infrastructure is inherited, not owned. Every tunnel, bridge, and drainpipe represents collective decisions made decades or centuries ago—decisions we still live inside. To move through a city ethically means acknowledging that lineage.

Steve never called himself an ‘explorer.’ He preferred ‘infrastructure interpreter.’ That distinction mattered. Exploration implies discovery; interpretation implies dialogue—with engineers, planners, maintenance crews, and the material itself. My biggest misconception had been thinking urban exploration required special access. In truth, it required special attention: to gradients, to signage fonts, to the sound of rain hitting different surfaces, to who cleans which benches and how often. These weren’t ‘secrets.’ They were open, observable, and freely available—if you knew what to look for and accepted that some doors stay locked for good reason.

📝 Practical Takeaways: Woven, Not Listed

Steve didn’t give me a checklist. He modeled habits—and those habits translated directly to budget-conscious travel:

• 🔍 Start with maintenance, not mystery. Before visiting any historic infrastructure (sewers, tunnels, viaducts), search the local authority’s ‘asset register’ or utility company’s public disclosure portal. Thames Water publishes quarterly infrastructure updates online 2. What’s listed as ‘under review’ or ‘scheduled for assessment’ often signals upcoming access windows—or permanent closures.
• 🚇 Ride transit like a surveyor. On buses or trains, note where stations have original tiling versus retrofits, where emergency exits align with street-level features, or where platforms slope subtly—clues to original grade and later modifications. This turns £2.50 commutes into low-cost field studies.
• 📚 Use archives as itinerary anchors. Many municipal archives offer free same-day document requests. London’s LMA lets visitors view scanned engineering plans without appointment. Arrive early, request materials related to your neighborhood of interest (e.g., ‘Fleet River culvert construction drawings, 1860–1875’), and let the documents shape your walk—not the other way around.
• ☕ Ask custodians, not influencers. The person sweeping the station platform or checking manhole covers knows more about daily use patterns than any YouTuber. A respectful, specific question—‘Do these grates get cleaned seasonally?’—often yields richer insight than hours of Googling.

None of this requires special equipment. Just a notebook, decent footwear, and willingness to stand still longer than feels comfortable.

⭐ Conclusion: Seeing Cities in Strata

I left London with damp socks, a notebook full of sketches of brick bond patterns, and a single photo—of Steve’s hand resting on a 1872 inspection plaque, his thumb covering the date. He’d insisted I take it ‘to remember scale.’ Not the grandeur of achievement, but the quiet persistence of upkeep.

This trip didn’t make me an urban explorer. It made me a more attentive traveler—one who understands that every city is a palimpsest, written over and over, with each layer still legible to those willing to read slowly. Budget travel, I now see, isn’t about spending less. It’s about investing attention where it’s rarely directed—and discovering that the most profound experiences aren’t behind velvet ropes, but beneath your feet, above your head, and written in the language of pipes, pavements, and power lines.

❓ FAQs: Practical Questions After Reading