You enter through the gift shop. Mike Nelson has turned the Hayward Gallery upside down and back to front for his survey exhibition, Extinction Beckons. ‘It’s been a very intensive four weeks,’ says an assistant putting the finishing touches to the multi-room installation ‘The Deliverance and The Patience’ (2001) when I visit two days before the opening.

Having the place to myself feels like having sole occupancy of the haunted house at the fair. This is less of a house, though, more a warren of passages and poky rooms bearing unsettling signs of previous habitation. Can the Hayward’s functional spaces really feel this spooky? Lit by one of Nelson’s signature red lights, even the green sign reading ‘FIRE EXIT’ makes me nervous. Nelson likes red bulbs and the glow they cast, suggestive of the embers of civilisation.

There are a lot of fire doors. There are a lot of doors full stop, with creaking hinges – no WD-40 in Nelson’s tool bag – and many choices confronting the curious Alice who dares to plunge down this rabbit hole. Once through an empty reception area with a whirring fan on an unmanned desk, then an airless room with a camp bed and sleeping bags, you face your first pair of exits. Sharp right or right? Sharp right leads into another airless room with scraps of crumpled fabric and a sewing-machine table with the name ‘AHMED’ gouged out of its Formica surface; right leads down a corridor to a purple-walled hippie shrine with a Garuda carving, Chinese Buddha and skull. Further on, you stumble on a red-walled gambling den with a fringed canopy light illuminating a toy roulette wheel. The narrow passages form random links between subcultures coexisting without connecting behind spring-hinge doors. Glimpses of ‘mainstream civilisation’ offer moments of comfort – a Muslim prayer room with rugs and wooden kneeler; a Third World travel agent with airline posters and bucket seats – but the moments are fleeting.

Everything is dusty and musty. Does Nelson spray on must like an anti-air freshener, or is it just the staleness of the air? It’s not an experience I’d recommend to claustrophobics. I was relieved to exit through a final fire door but left with a nagging feeling that I’d missed something. I once missed an entire Mike Nelson installation concealed behind the stands at the 2006 Frieze Art Fair. The other worry, with Nelson, is that you’ve missed the point. What are his haunted habitats about? Partly, like the science fiction that inspired them, a fear of technological progress. On one level, his whole oeuvre could be an elegy for an analogue age in a digital era. Early installations such as ‘The Deliverance and The Patience’ were reactions against the 1990s obsession with video projection and ‘the lack of patience people seemed to have for looking at objects’: they were narrative structures ‘that entrapped the viewer; even if they were just looking to find their way out, looking was something that they had to do’.

In recent years Nelson has moved away from immersive installations towards free-standing works that actually look like sculptures. ‘The Asset Strippers’, first shown at Tate Britain in 2019, are totemic monuments to Britain’s industrial past made from disused machinery picked up at liquidation sales. Nelson picks up stuff from all over: car-boot sales, flea markets, junk shops, salvage yards. He’s a hoarder who has made a career out of his habit. All the stuff in this retrospective has come out of storage to be reassembled, not necessarily in the same order: past works have been remade rather than recreated. First shown at Modern Art Oxford in 2004, Nelson’s ‘Triple Bluff Canyon’ – a tribute to American land artist Robert Smithson’s ‘Partially Buried Woodshed’ (1970) – has acquired some blown-out tyres from the M25. The 20 truckloads of earth that went into Smithson’s original work on Kent State University campus have been replaced with sand and half-buried oil drums in Nelson’s indoor version. Can the floor of the Hayward stand the weight, or will this student of entropy reduce the gallery to rubble? ‘I’m fascinated by something that only exists for a moment, then collapses,’ Nelson says in an interview in the show’s catalogue.

The symbolism of tyres and oil drums shouldn’t mislead one into thinking that Nelson’s work has an obvious environmental message. He’s not that simplistic. Aware that the world is a mess, he almost seems to relish the mayhem which, after all, supplies his raw material. He took the exhibition title ‘Extinction Beckons’ from a motorcycle helmet sticker, not a climate change placard. In that gung-ho context, he found the statement disarming: ‘To me,’ he says, ‘the inherent optimism of its dark humour negates the bleakness of its sentiment, and this somehow seems to encapsulate all of the contradictions of what it is to be human.’