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An editor once bellowed at me that journalism doesn’t deal in metaphors and symbolism. I felt duly chastised but I’m not sure they were totally right.

Sure, the stories we tell aren’t generally allegories or parables – they’re about real things and real events (that’s kind of the point). But sometimes things are so loaded with obvious symbolism that it becomes impossible to resist. Think Donald Trump taking a literal wrecking ball to the White House.

That said, even if a story about, say, a collapsing bridge seems emblematic of national decline, you’re still reporting on the collapse of a bridge. It isn’t just a metaphor. When a reporter gets that interplay of fact and symbolism right, the story becomes all the more powerful and insightful. A great example of this alchemy in action is a series of articles we’re currently publishing by the Guardian features writer Sam Wollaston called Abandoned Britain: the story of the UK in six empty buildings.

I spoke to him about the series for this peek inside the Guardian’s journalism.

“Everyone loves an abandoned building,” Sam says. “They’re a bit scary and possibly dangerous. You suspect they have secrets and stories.”

His six-part series is a testament to this. The second instalment explored St Tyfrydog’s church in Wales – overrun with ivy, and with a collapsed floor and “bubbled and pustulous” walls. The previous week, Sam wrote about the former Wildings department store, once the poshest shop in Newport, but which now bears the marks of the building’s more recent incarnations as an illicit cannabis farm and improv skatepark. The building’s marble facade has been boarded up and the elevator buttons hang from the wall by their wires.

“There’s an in-built sadness to this project,” Sam reflects. “An empty building is a building that isn’t being used for its intended purpose. So it’s always going to be a story about things ending.”

Last week, our north of England correspondent Mark Brown reported on the Victorian Society’s annual list of 10 endangered buildings in England and Wales, with a warning from the society’s president that deserted structures are at risk of arson attacks and continued decay.

Derelict buildings might seem purpose-built metaphors for the UK right now, but one of the reasons Sam’s Abandoned Britain series works so well is because he doesn’t hammer this home. He just tells the story of each building faithfully, and with an eye for the kind of details that can bring them back to life.

“The buildings are the embodiment of the story,” Sam says. “The fact that they represent something broader isn’t something you have to force. The abandoned church tells you a story about people not going to church any more and a story about changing demographics and deprivation.”

Last week’s article was about the Hulme Hippodrome in Manchester, a former variety theatre that once boasted performances from Harry Houdini and Stan Laurel but has fallen into disrepair, with locals fearing it could be demolished and redeveloped as housing. “The building tells you a story about property development in the UK, but also about why there’s more to a place than just somewhere to live. You need cultural spaces, too.”

The details in Sam’s stories don’t just make the buildings feel eerily vivid, they also deepen our understanding of the broader, state-of-the-nation issues at play. For instance, it turns out that the demise of Wildings department store after 144 years of trading owes as much to the closure of city centre car parks as it does to the growth of online shopping.

As well as being rich in these kinds of details and insights, the Abandoned Britain series is also visually stunning. As you scroll down the digital articles, pictures of each building in its heyday emerge like ghosts superimposed on today’s dilapidated structures. Instead of creating a before-and-after effect, the art direction captures how the past and present often coexist in people’s minds.

Ellen Wishart, who helped design the features, says one of the aims was to blur the boundary between memory and reality: “We didn’t want it to feel like a basic then-and-now comparison. It was more about showing how places carry their histories with them, and finding those layers still here if you look closely.”

Picture editor Sarah Gilbert commissioned photographer Christopher Thomond to capture the unsettling atmosphere of the buildings, while art director Ling Ko devised a ghostly shuddering effect on the main images. Ellen, who created the haunting fade-in visuals, explains that “the gentle fade is designed to emphasise the spooky tone of Ling’s main animation, which we emulated throughout the set of articles in typography as well.”

The fading-in typography, which set the articles’ overall visual tone, was devised by creative developer, Pip Lev. “We used typographic movement that hinted to the liminality of the spaces, held on the threshold between past and present,” explains Pip. They also came up with the idea for photos that change from black and white to colour as the reader scrolls. “The photos emerge from black and white to colour as the stories bring these spaces back to life.”

“Ellen and the team have lifted the series into something that looks amazing,” adds Sam. “Overlaying old wedding photos on the images of the church, for example, makes it such a brilliant digital experience.”

The wedding photos in question are of Peggy and John Thomas. Peggy, now 85, accompanied Sam when he visited the church, along with her brother Tom Brown and his wife, Jane. They are central to the building’s story: Tom was the church’s warden until it shut its doors, and had been a member of the congregation all his life. Jane used to play the organ that still sits in the building, albeit now covered in plaster.

“Stories about empty buildings are only interesting if they’re also about people who’ve been involved in them, and that’s been hard to find,” Sam says. “But the best thing about doing this series has been the people I’ve met.”

Stories still to come in the series include a former pub in the Lake District and a virtually empty tower block in London in which five flats are still occupied. Sam has just returned from visiting it and is still struck by the contrast between the warmth and cosiness of those remaining inhabited flats and the empty corridors outside.

“We did think about including a derelict factory in the series, but that would have been a story about earlier deindustrialisation. We wanted to tell stories about Britain today.”

This piece is taken from the Guardian’s weekly email for supporters, sent on Tuesdays. To support the Guardian’s work on a single or monthly basis, please click here.