Another feature on the piss-soaked urban blight that is the Balmain Leagues Club. This one was the Daily Mail UK, who picked up the Lost Collective gallery for an overseas readership.
Balmain Leagues Club is a useful example of how the urban-exploration culture of secrecy-at-all-costs has outgrown its purpose. There are sensitive locations where keeping the address quiet matters. I have collections from some of those, and they will never see daylight on Lost Collective for exactly that reason. Balmain Leagues Club is as far from one of those as you can get.
The site is beyond saving. It is an icon of developer greed gone wrong; if the building caught fire tomorrow it would probably be an improvement. It has no heritage value. It has no architectural features of note. The fabric is rotten, vandalised, and well past anything that could honestly be called restoration.
Wests Tigers are no closer to sorting out their on-field problems, let alone the leagues club site. Rozelle Village apparently has a security guard doing four rounds a day. Possibly at the wrong building.
"Eerie photographs show how the Balmain Leagues Club has deteriorated in the seven years since it was sold for just $1. The walls in Sydney's inner west have been covered top to bottom in graffiti, cords hang tangled from the ceiling, and furnishings are smashed and sprawled across the dilapidated site that squatters took over in 2010. A series of images by photographer Brett Patman, who captures abandoned and 'forgotten environments' for his project Lost Collective, show how far the club's residence has plummeted as fans remember their golden age and the memorable 1989 grand final against the Canberra Raiders."
Read the full Daily Mail feature at dailymail.co.uk.
