Light industry: corridors and staircases of the old factory

It's like dreams. You walk down an endlessly long corridor, turn round and find yourself in an endlessly long corridor again. Sometimes something flashes far ahead: a human figure, some faces, bizarrely curved pipes. At some point you come to a staircase, go down a floor, or go upstairs, and you find yourself back in the labyrinth of corridors.

The old factory building is located a little to the south of the popular Sevkabel creative space. This building is located on the shore of the Gulf of Finland, and the promenade around the factory building complemented the Sevkabel promenade as soon as the factory building was handed over to the new creative space. A bar line is located on the embankment. Numerous restaurants, coffee shops and bars were happy to take advantage of the opportunity to set up summer terraces overlooking the sea.

The production noise died down in the old workshops. The new owners of the building started looking for tenants for these premises. The task is not the easiest. For a restaurant, a beautiful view is a big plus, but for a shop it is much more useful to have a high footfall. It seems that some of the premises are still empty. Others house a theatre, a skate park, numerous workshops. The rooms on the ground floor with windows to the street with bus traffic are given to various shops.

The factory building was built at the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries, and was slightly rebuilt in the first years of the 20th century. This building was built especially for the chintz factory, which had been operating in the neighbouring building since 1834. The chintz-printing factory was located here, it specialised in the production of cotton, staple, chintz and mixed fabrics. The factory carried out bleaching and dyeing of fabrics, drawing on them. The specialisation of the factory remained unchanged all the following years, despite the formidable historical events. Except that in the 1960s, production lines for dyeing synthetic and artificial fabrics were added.

Most of the factory's corridors are painted an even white colour. Under the layers of paint, the texture of the bricks shows through. Street art artists do not often visit this location, and there are few drawings on the white walls. But sometimes the design of corridors reminds of modern art exhibition halls. A fragment of a wall with old panelling stands out from the general flat background, a group of fire extinguishers looks like an art object, a telephone table - what is not an installation? After walking around this building, I felt exactly the same as if I had gone to an exhibition, the new visual impressions awakened a strong emotional response. Although it seemed that I had only walked down a few corridors...