Urban exploration, social media, and the liability nobody costed for.

In February 2026, a video went up on YouTube showing people climbing through the fenced-off perimeter of County Hall in Worcester. They were challenged by security guards. The footage was published anyway, and West Mercia Police confirmed they were investigating.

County Hall is not a forgotten shed on the edge of an industrial estate. It is 200,000 square feet of former county council headquarters, closed since June 2024 after legionella bacteria and reinforced autoclaved aerated concrete were found, with repairs assessed at more than £36 million. It is fenced, signed, covered by extensive CCTV, and has security on site around the clock.

It was still filmed from the inside. By May, local reporting noted explorers had been photographed on the roof.

If a building with that level of protection can be entered and published, the question for anyone holding an empty commercial asset is not whether it could happen to theirs. It is whether it already has, and nobody has looked.

First, the word

The activity is called urbex — short for urban exploration. Its practitioners are urban explorers, and they will tell you, accurately, that they are not burglars. The culture has a stated ethic: take nothing but photographs, leave nothing but footprints. Most of them mean it.

That matters, because the security industry has spent years talking about this badly. Treating every explorer as a thief gets the risk assessment wrong in both directions — it overstates what most of them do, and it completely misses what actually costs money.

Urbex is not new. What is new is the distribution. The subculture has been documented since the 1990s, but the past few years have brought a fresh surge driven by a younger audience and a much larger digital footprint: dedicated forums, a Reddit community tens of thousands strong, and a steady flow of YouTube and TikTok content built around getting inside places other people cannot go.

Britain is unusually well supplied. We industrialised first, so we deindustrialised first. Add the Victorian institutional building programme — asylums, hospitals, workhouses — and a decade of retail and office contraction, and the result is one of the richest stocks of abandoned buildings in Europe.

Your vacant unit is content.

The part that costs money is the second wave

Here is the mechanism that property managers consistently miss.

The explorer is rarely the loss. The explorer is the survey.

A published urbex video is a free, high-quality intelligence product about your asset, distributed to an audience that includes people with no interest whatsoever in photography. It establishes, on camera and in public:

  • that the building is empty
  • which fence panel, window or roof light gives access
  • whether anyone responds, and how fast
  • what is still inside — cable, lead, copper, plant, machinery
  • the internal layout, floor by floor

Metal theft from vacant property is estimated at around £770 million a year. Copper cable, lead flashing, roof coverings and pipework are stripped by people who are organised about it, and who very often arrive in high-visibility clothing with a vehicle and ladders, because looking like a contractor is the cheapest disguise available.

Then there is fire. Insurers are consistent on this: arson is among the most common causes of loss at empty premises, and a building that visibly reads as unoccupied is markedly more likely to be attacked than one that does not. Once a building is breached, everything else follows — rough sleeping, fly-tipping, drug use, further fires.

The sequence is almost always the same. Access is discovered. Access is published. Access is used.

The statistics are hiding it from you

If you go looking for the national picture, you will struggle, and the reason is technical.

Official fire statistics for England split incidents into primary and secondary fires. Primary fires are those in non-derelict buildings, or any fire involving a casualty or attended by five or more appliances. Fires in single derelict buildings are classified as secondary — the same category as grassland and refuse fires.

So when the headline figure reports building fires, derelict buildings are largely not in it.

That is not a scandal, it is a definitional choice, and there are sound operational reasons for it. But the consequence for a property manager is real: the category of building you are responsible for is the category the national numbers are worst at describing. If you are waiting for a statistic to justify the spend, it is structurally unlikely to arrive.

What does show up is severity. Analysis of English fire data found that permanently vacant buildings sustained the greatest average fire damage — around 38 square metres, against roughly 14 for occupied homes. Empty buildings burn longer because nobody is there to notice.

And then the schools break up

Everything above describes the year-round position. From late July it gets worse, and it changes character.

Fire services say this plainly. County Durham and Darlington reported attending 1,043 deliberate fires in the first six months of 2026 alone, against 3,103 across the whole of 2025, and their station manager put the pattern simply: school holidays and warm weather typically bring a spike in deliberate incidents. North Yorkshire made the same warning ahead of the holidays after more than a hundred deliberate fires in York in six months.

Northamptonshire's Arson Task Force went further and addressed property owners directly, asking landlords to secure vacant and derelict buildings and to carry out regular checks through the school holiday period, on the basis that unsecured buildings become magnets for trespass, vandalism and arson when young people have more free time.

That is a fire and rescue service telling landlords, in public, to inspect their empty buildings more often over the summer. It is worth noting who is not saying it: the insurer, who will nonetheless ask what you did.

The shift matters for the liability question, because the population changes. Out of term, the people getting into your building are less likely to be adults with cameras and a code of conduct, and more likely to be children with an afternoon to fill. The fatalities in this area bear that out — a twelve-year-old who fell through a roof on a Lancaster industrial estate, a fourteen-year-old through a roof in Kirkstall, a twelve-year-old from the roof of a derelict factory in Derby that locals had repeatedly reported.

The law has always been less forgiving where children are concerned. Herrington was a six-year-old through a broken fence. A building that an adult would recognise as dangerous is, to a child, somewhere to climb.

The liability, which is the part that should worry you

Most owners assume a trespasser injured on their property has no claim. That is wrong, and it has been wrong since 1984.

The Occupiers' Liability Act 1984 created a duty of care owed by an occupier to non-visitors — trespassers included. It is narrower than the duty owed to lawful visitors: it covers death and personal injury only, not damage to property. But it exists, and under section 1(3) it is triggered when three conditions are met:

  1. the occupier is aware of the danger, or has reasonable grounds to believe it exists
  2. the occupier knows or has reasonable grounds to believe that someone may come into the vicinity of that danger
  3. the risk is one against which the occupier could reasonably be expected to offer some protection

Read condition two again, and then think about a YouTube video of your building.

The 1984 Act turns on knowledge. A published urbex video is a time-stamped, publicly available record that people are entering your asset — often with commentary about how they got in. Once that exists, "we had no reason to think anybody went in there" becomes a difficult position to hold.

The principle behind the Act was established in British Railways Board v Herrington (1972), where a six-year-old was electrocuted after getting through a broken fence, and the House of Lords held that an occupier owed trespassers a duty of common humanity — particularly where the occupier knew trespass was routine.

An "occupier" is whoever controls the premises. That can be the freeholder, the leaseholder, the local authority, or the managing agent.

This is not theoretical. Inquests into deaths in derelict buildings hear this evidence directly. At the former Hallam Tower hotel in Sheffield, where a 19-year-old student died after a fall, an inquest was told of an epidemic of trespassing, and heard that the owners had boarded windows, installed barbed wire and greased surfaces — while explorers brought their own ladders, hid them on site, and stacked bricks to get higher.

That owner was not negligent through inaction. They were doing a great deal. They were simply doing static things to a dynamic problem.

And consider the detail that should reframe your inspection regime entirely: a 22-year-old who fell through the roof of a disused dairy in Devon lay undiscovered inside the building for more than 24 hours. If your asset is inspected weekly, the honest question is how long someone could be lying inside yours.

The insurance position, briefly

Most commercial policies contain a vacancy condition. Cover typically changes once a building has been unoccupied beyond a set period, and continued cover is usually conditional on documented inspections at a stated frequency.

The critical word is documented. At claim stage, the difference between a settled claim and a disputed one is very often not whether inspections happened, but whether they can be evidenced — dated, timed, located, with a record of what was found.

A signature in a paper book does not do that. A GPS-verified, time-stamped record with photographs does. We cover what insurers actually require from vacant property security in more detail in a separate guide.

What actually reduces this

Not more hours. That is the reflex answer, and it is usually the wrong one.

A vacant asset attracts attention for identifiable reasons: it looks empty, access is available at a known point, and nothing has ever happened to anyone who went in. Address those three things and the problem shrinks. Add officers without addressing them and you have simply bought a more expensive version of the same exposure.

The first question is always the same one, and any owner can ask it today: is this asset already published? If footage of your building exists, you are on notice in the legal sense, whether or not anyone has told you. That is worth knowing regardless of who you then call.

Beyond that, the work is diagnostic before it is physical. A vacant asset is breached at a specific point, by a specific route, for a specific reason, and the response that works is the one aimed at that — not a uniform perimeter upgrade, and not more hours bolted onto a patrol schedule. Establishing which point, which route and which reason is the job. It is not something that can be read off a price list, and it is not the same answer twice.

What we would say is that the assessment comes first and costs nothing. Everything after it should follow from what the assessment finds.

The buildings that get hurt are not the ones with the smallest budgets. They are the ones where nobody was looking.

We publish a monthly Security Intelligence Briefing covering crime, fly-tipping and vacancy trends affecting commercial property across the West Midlands and Worcestershire. It is free and there is nothing to buy. Read the latest issue.

Sources and further reading

Risk Secured is a West Midlands security company working with commercial and industrial assets across Birmingham and Worcestershire.

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