


Apocalypse … now? An urban explorer trekked inside an abandoned housing estate, which he said resembled the “end of the world.”
In a TikTok video that has amassed over 500,000 views, Sean Piper shows viewers the property, located in South East London.
More than 170 homes spread across 16 blocks are seen decaying and dilapidated.
Piper, who hails from Kent, discovered the estate after stumbling upon it online. After going through it, he described it as looking “like the end of the world.”
“Walking around the estate was a very eerie experience,” Piper told Jam Press.
“It reminded me of scary films like ‘28 Days Later’ or even video games like ‘The Last of Us’ or ‘Resident Evil.'”
The property has been abandoned since 2010. It took nearly a year for the local council to move all the former tenants out.
Each tenant was offered one-off payments and reduced rent in a new build.
The plan was to demolish the old buildings and, in their place, build 165 new luxury apartments.
But the plans remained at a standstill and never materialized. Following a fire this past March, the structures were officially fenced off for demolition.
“The flats have … sat empty and open to the elements and for people to explore,” Piper said, adding that “many residents took the moving opportunity to have a clear out of possessions, many things were left inside, kids’ toys, televisions and shoes and clothes and even a couple that were fully furnished still.”
Piper said visiting the area felt as if he had gone back in time, and got a “creepy feeling from the beginning.”
“It wasn’t fenced off when I went and even the car parks were very derelict looking, the lamp posts had smashed lights, it was a ghost town,” he said. “The properties were almost all open, either by a door or window.”
“They were metal sheeted so very dark inside, walking around inside with a torch provided a creepy atmosphere.”
Piper even revealed that apartments that were damaged from the fire had signs of squatters, which included dirty mattresses, bags full of old beer bottles, needles on the floor and cigarette butts.
“Some of them were relatively clean and I just was surprised by how [many] belongings people decided to leave.”
“Strange to think of the life that whole place held,” one person commented under the video.
“So sad… peoples’ memories left behind,” added another user.
Piper was there for over 5 hours and was able to locate a fully furnished bedroom, a completed living room and a stocked kitchen in one of the abandoned apartments.
“The blocks were parallel to each other with walkways connecting them, so at one point I was in a courtyard surrounded by four derelict blocks, nothing active was in sight. It was like the end of the world.”
The video clip was captioned: “The best things I’ve found in the abandoned housing estate.”
An untouched bedroom with a mattress, clothes, furniture, an old record player, and a broken cabinet are seen in the video.
“With so much homelessness, why are these properties empty,” one person commented.
“Such a waste, it’s going to be knocked down turned in to more expensive houses that [are] not built to last,” another person wrote.
“Untouched bedrooms but plants still alive and intact,” another noticed.