The Book House

 I’ve visited here twice now, once with Ella and also with Tom.  I thought I would start the blog with this explore as it is one of my favourites.  

For a bit of background information and history the house was built in the 17th Century and was formerly part of a dairy.  In the grounds of the house stands a Grade II Listed Lime Kiln.  The name given in the urbex community is The Book House because of the vast amount of books in one room in particular.  Speaking online to local residents it seems that the previous owner had many books of which there were a lot of first editions which have been saved and are in the hands of a local historian.

When me and Ella visited it was a walk on, but when I went with Tom we had to slide under a heras fence which is always fun.  To get in you have to go through the basement of the house which was full of old books and magazines that were sopping wet due to the river bursting its banks during bad weather.  The smell of rotting books in stagnant water is something to behold 🤢. There are also tiny little mice running around in the basement and a particularly evil looking false widow spider 😱.

Me and Ella had a rather strange encounter here, we could hear people moving around upstairs and when we reached the top floor heard laughter coming from a room.  It turned out there was no one there but us, I do believe in paranormal but I do like to find reasonable explanations before going down the haunted route.  I’m still not sure what we heard.

Now this house is huge and very damp and rotten, some of the floors were spongy underfoot.  In one room there is a big hole in the floor where I assume someone went through the rotten floorboards.  There was also an abundance of zombie spiders (spiders that have been taken over by a parasite thing to do with the damp, they look like they’ve been coated in a white wax).

This room here had several walking frames in it and nothing else, looked a bit creepy.

Everything in the house was damp and the smell in some of the rooms was rank.  Some of the rooms had been set up for photos by previous explorers.

This was definitely my favourite room, I always find something sad about people’s old shoes left behind.

Before I knew the history of the house and the fact there were walking frames and other apparatus usually found in care homes I wondered if this has been a care home.

This room is where the name the Book House came from, it’s not very clear in the picture but there was a huge cobweb hanging down across the chair.

We found lots of pages from old newspapers on one of the floors, look at that yearly wage 😂

In all, on both explores we spent a couple of hours here looking around and taking photos.  When I left with Ella we bumped into a neighbour which usually means a load of hassle and questions on what we were up to and a lecture but this lady was really nice and she told us some things about the people who used to live there and that there is a planning application to knock the house down and build new properties on it.  

If you would like to see a larger selection of photos from this explore they can be found on my Facebook page https://www.facebook.com/RXQueen74

Thanks for looking