doors that arent used anymore
I can’t exactly identify why or when I started taking pictures of doors that aren’t used anymore, but the when was at least about 4 years ago. The why? Harder to pin down. There is certainly an element of being a frustrated urbexer, those brave souls fascinated with abandoned places enough to risk life and limb to explore them. The thing is I have neither the courage or athletic ability requisite for that most liminal of pursuits. So perhaps it began as a way for me to photograph the outside of those places, to document the decay, change and ruination of spaces around me.
But once I actively tried to search my environment for doors that aren’t used anymore it became apparent that it was not only abandoned buildings that have them. Buildings in use have them in abundance, and every form of building you can think of. Suddenly they became not just symbols of decay and unuse, but of the evolving nature of a space, charting changes in its function and purpose, and how people interact with it.
It helps living amongst an ancient landscape where so many different peoples have left their mark over the millenia. There are buildings amongst us that date back to 3700 bc, stone circles and tumuli litter the hills along with the remains of Roman villas, Saxon churches, Norman keeps and medieval buildings in most towns as well as others from every era since. This is an old country and over that time villages, towns, cities and the buildings within them have been in constant flux. And there are markers for that change, both visible and hidden, like ghost signs and my redundant doors..
Churches, an abundant sources of such doors, are a great case in point. With absolutely no quantative evidence at all I would posit that old churches on average have 4-5 doors but these days often no more than 2 are in use. For centuries they would have been the hub and focal point of entire communities. But these days congregations have dwindled, services less frequent, and many churches are now shuttered and silent. How many vicarages have a vicar left in them? Most of the churches I visit are serene but barely used, yet they retain the form they had when they were thriving. A natural evolution in response to such a change is the permanent closing of unused doors, streamlining the space, enhancing its old ergonomics for new.
Unused side door at Bristol Cathedral
Unused door at Trinity Church, Cheltenham
Lower door at St Nicholas Church, Bristol
Large, foreboding and looking faintly fortified, designed to project strength and instill confidence in their customers, the baroque and gothic edifices that typify bank buildings that sprang up during the Victorian period are a common sight on our high streets. But few of these still house banks, instead they may be bars, or coffee shops, or some other high street staple.
Banks aren’t the only buildings like this in our town and city centres. The Victorian period saw a lot of bespoke, specialised architecture being built: shops are the most obvious, but also schoolhouses, courthouses, swimming pools, train stations, buildings built from the ground up. They met the commercial demands of the time, but those demands shift from one era to the next. While a portion of those still fulfill the function for which they were designed, many others have changed, even railway stations after the Beeching cuts of the 1960s. These changes profoundly affect the way people interact, use and move through the buildings.
Internally upon entering the building that change can be explicit and obvious, with extensive remodelling everywhere; a kitchen replacing a bank vault, a living room where the fourth form used to learn French. But externally its architectural skin will remain the unchanged: old schools will still have the seperate entrances for girls and boys for example, but now it is a residence does it need two entrances? The function of the doors can be the most obvious exterior marker for the changes within.
Old school house in Coates, Gloucestershire, now a residence
‘Nacional School A.D. 1849’ ghost sign below the old school clock
The front doors to the school, one for girls and one for boys. Note only one is in use
These unused doors can take many forms. Most obvious and unequivocal are what I call ghost doors. These are doors where there are no doors remaining at all, where the doorway has been permanently blocked, bricked in, plastered over. The frame may still remain, or sometimes just the lintel, with a change in the shade and rhythm of the brickwork indicating the space the door once occupied. This is an unused door’s final form, and short of some major rennovation and significant change in occupancy or function it will never be a door again
Ghost Door No 1, or patient zero. Nothing remains of the door beyound the lintel and gate in the railings in front. Residential house in Cheltenham, this door was at the front now the side door is the main entrance
Two-for-one ghost door. Did the smaller door replace the larger entrance, before being removed itself?
Ghost door on King Street, Bristol, on the Old Vic
Ghost door in Vicar’s Close in the City of Wells, considered Europe’s oldest intact residential street
Ghost door in the honey-coloured Cotswold stone of Bourton-on-the-Water
Ghost door, Lansdown Terrace Lane, Cheltenham
There can be no doubt ghost doors are not used anymore but with others it is more opaque. I know I do not always get it right: I have been photographing a door when it has opened and someone stepped out. Some will have a clear indicator, blocked by boards or metal sheet, but with others you look harder for clues to be certain. A fair few are painted over, the dried paint acting as an adhoc sealant around the doors edges. Others will have their handles and keyholes removed, the once active letter box silent and still.
Some are simply locked for one final time, walked away from and forgotten about. With those you approach with inuition, and look for visual clues: cobwebs stretched thin across and around the doorway are always a great indicator. Dirt splashed across the base of the doors by rain and neither cleaned nor naturally worn away by the regular passge of feet. Creeping plants and grasses are quick to move into neglected spaces, and sometimes placed their intentionally, the unused door now a canvas for ornamental trees and plant pots brimming with flowers.
Painted over door, Gloucester.
A door with no handles
Nature has reclaimed this door, Tintern
Condident this door is not in use, Bewlby
Detritus builds up on unused doors, Chipping Campden
Not getting in here, Chipping Campden
One door I can have no doubt is this one, the old wooden doors of Chepstow Castle, now no longer attached. Once thought to come from the 13th century but dendrochronology, or tree-ring dating, discovered that they were built around 1190AD making them the olded castle doors in Europe. They were originally sheathed in iron plates to defy any rams or fire the castle’s enemies threw at them. Now they are enjoying well-deserved retirement inside the castle itself. It features elaborate lattice framework featured the earliest mortice-and-tenon joints known in Britain.
One thing that is frustrating about taking pictures of doors if I always wonder what is behind them but very rarely get to see. On a recent trip to a Bordeaux winery I did just that. Chateau Leoville-Barton undertook an 11 million euro rennovation of their stable block, leaving the skin of the stables intact but underneath put in a state-of-the-art winery. One thing that went was some of the doors.
Outside
And inside. You can see the same windows at the top of the blocked doors
Doors have always been rich with symbolism. There is a natural dichotomy to them, at once an entrance when open and barrier when shut. They are a liminal threshold, the embodiment of betwixt and between: moving from one reality to another, one state of being to a different one and they are an unoccupiable space inbetween, a portal that only ecists for people to transition through.
A common saying in English is ‘when one door closes, another opens’ which is commonly attributed to Alexander Graham Bell, but of which similar variations date back further. One of the most elegant expressions of it comes from Helen Keller:
“When one door of happiness closes, another opens, but often we look so long at the closed door that we do not see the one that has been opened for us.”
It has a similar wistfulness and warning to it as Bell’s quote, which in full reads: “When one door closes, another door opens; but we so often look so long and so regretfully upon the closed door, that we do not see the ones which open for us”. There is a sage lesson in here, one that always needs to be remembered: that doors being closed to us does not mean all doors are closed, some remain open and in them are infinite possibilities.
There is also the idiom of sliding doors, a far more recent cultural phenomena. In the 1998 film of the same name the expression originates from the main character experiences two seperate but parallel realities, the first when she misses her train and the sliding doors are shut, and one where she makes the train and the sliding doors are open. The two realities caused by the different state of the doors are profoundly divergent showing how some tiny twist of fate can cause huge ripples.
So what of my doors that aren’t used anymore? They land on the closed side of a door’s dichotomy, and even more so as there is a finality to their closed state. And some are just that, barring entry to a space, denying you egress and experience of that space. But far, far more often they are a symbol of change: this door here is closed, but it is closed because that other one is open and you can enter there, doors that are symbols of an evolution of a space
But even those with that absolutism to them, a full denial of entry to somewhere, have a magic to them, to an inquisitive mind that conjurs what might be beyond through imagination. To me these are the secret garden doors and what is beyond them is entirely down to you.
One final postscript to my rambling. Taking photographs of doors would seem easy and straightforward but it is not. The first pictures I took of doors four plus years ago are mostly unusable, poorly framed and taken at an angle. Because of a doors strong, defined geometrical any small error is exaggerated. The camera must be at the right height and exactly square to the door and be correctly framed. I will take mulitple shots and even now there will be ones where I mutter at myself what the hell was I playing at. Because if you get it wrong no amount of cropping or rotating will make it look right, at least not to my eye now. That problem is compounded by taking pictures of older doors where there is always some chaos in the angles somewhere, when time or change has shifted something from the parallel.
Written by A James Cole