Out of Hours

2026 · Alderley Park, Cheshire

Project

I went into work on a Sunday. It's the same building I sit in every week, with the same desk but none of it seemed to know me. This took a while to place. I know this building completely but emptied of the people who gave it its reason to be, it nonchalantly refused to feel like mine any longer. There's a German word for that refusal. Unheimlich. I think dictionaries will say it means "uncanny", but the literal sense is closer to "unhomely". The unease of the familiar turning strange. A place you have never seen can be unfamiliar but your own place gone strange is decidedly worse.

It was daylight. That is what unsettled me and it took a second Sunday to work out why. A building empty at night is doing what buildings do after dark. Nobody expects any life inside it at three in the morning. A building empty at noon has no such excuse. The lights are on and the heating runs for nobody. The chairs sit square at desks and will stay clean and empty all day. A machine built for thousands, switched on and serving no one. Except me.

I've thought about this for most of my life and long before I brought a camera to it. From a young age when lying awake in the small hours I would picture the places that had been full that day and stood empty now. The shopping centre after closing. The school yard. The open corner at Maine Road. How did they feel, right then, holding all that silence where the noise had been. I built an eerie unease out of imagining them right now in the dead of night.

Then one Sunday I walked in here and found I had the hour wrong. That feeling I reached for at three in the morning lived here at midday. Night emptiness is permitted and expected off the clock. But at full light that's another matter. A door held open on a building running a working day for absolutely nobody. It's the closest I have come to photographing the thing that kept my mind occupied in the night, and it turned out to be a Sunday morning, the place still expecting people who will not arrive.

Held Open

Black and white photograph
Alderley Park, Cheshire
26 July 2026, 11:14

A lit corridor with strip lighting overhead and an empty armchair set against the wall.

A low view along an empty carpeted corridor, doors closed on both sides.

An empty corridor with planting on the left wall, a doorway framing the length of it.

An empty corridor, timber doors along the left, a planted wall to the right.

Fire extinguishers mounted on a planted corridor wall, the corridor empty in both directions.

A corridor seen from a tiled floor, clean and empty, doors closed along its length.

An empty corridor with a planted wall to the right and doors standing closed.

A radiator on the wall of an empty corridor, lights running, a lit doorway at the end.

A dark lobby beneath a Block 3 sign, glazed double doors at the far end.

A stairwell photographed from above, white handrails turning down through the floors.

A stair landing and balustrade, a lit corridor visible through the opening beyond.

A stairwell void looking up, a tall narrow shaft of light between blank walls.

Two glazed meeting room doors beside a tea point, the counter set and unused.

A waiting area of sofas and squared cushions under two wall lights, nobody sitting.

Four chairs squared to a bench desk beneath four pendant lights, a screen switched on, nobody there.

A wide dark corridor running between glazed offices, empty end to end.

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