Several years ago, I carried out research into the industrial ruins of the UK. At that time, derelict structures littered much of the British urban landscape as waves of deindustrialisation and economic restructuring followed the decline of manufacturing. The ruins were remarkable for many reasons. They served as a venue for a host of unofficial social and cultural practices, from the respectable to the transgressive (Edensor, 2005a). They offered vicarious contact with the denizens of the industrial past: the workers who populated such factories and personal traces of whom lay across shop floors and workbenches in clothing, tools, work-related graffiti and vernacular customisation of work stations; people who are rarely conjured up in official and commodified versions of heritage (Edensor, 2005b). They delivered a rich sensory environment beyond the often antiseptic spaces of the over-regulated city, provoking intense experiences of smell, sound and touch, and an unfamiliar, disorderly aesthetic (Edensor, 2007). Finally, these ruins revealed the multiple materialities out of which buildings are composed (Edensor, 2005c). Lath emerged from behind plaster walls, tiles were scattered across floors, pipes and wires burst forth from their usual confinement. Timber joists and iron girders surfaced to expose structural skeletons, and multifarious debris and detritus collected in peculiar compounds. I focus on this dimension in this chapter.