Sport & Fitness

Urban thrills

Climbing
London’s mountains may be notable by their absence, but this doesn’t seem to have dampened the enthusiasm for climbing in the capital. There are three main indoor facilities: the Castle, Mile End and the Westway Sports Centre. Each features a wide variety of bouldering walls (free ascent just a few feet from the floor), top-roped climbs and lead routes (the former always secured; the latter offering the potential for the occasional short but exhilarating fall).

Arguably the best indoor climbing wall in the city, the Castle (Green Lanes, N4 2HA, 8211 7000, www.castle-climbing.co.uk) is set inside an imposing Victorian folly. Two floors offer a huge range of top-roped climbs suitable for beginners and experts alike, with excellent crash-matted bouldering walls of varying degrees of difficulty, and a cave with a fully climbable roof and four walls. The Geckos Club (077761 76007) organises courses for children, while regular Women with Altitude sessions are narrowing the gender gap.

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Operating out of an old pipe-bending factory and buzzing with an atmosphere all its own, the Mile End Climbing Wall (Haverfield Road, E3 5BE (8980 0289, www.mileendwall.org.uk) is run by serious climbers, the average route presenting a tougher challenge than at most other large-scale installations. At the Westway Sports Centre(1 Crowthorne Road, W10 6RP, 8969 0992, www.nkat.org.uk), you’ll find more than 100 of the best-designed and -maintained climbs in London, with 50 new routes and 50 new boulder problems devised each month. For a more chilling experience, check out Ellis Brigham (3-11 Southampton Street, WC2E 7HA (7395 1010, www.ellis-brigham.com), which contains England’s only indoor ice climbing wall, open Tuesday to Sunday all year round. An eight-metre outdoor ice climbing column joined Somerset House’s seasonal attractions (see p113) in winter 2005, but, unlike the famous ice-skating rink, it’s unconfirmed whether it will make a repeat appearance in winter 2006/7.

Parkour
While boards are necessary equipment for skaters, who surf their way through the concrete jungle, traceurs need only their agility and lightness of foot. In this sense, parkour (see also p15 Leap of faith) can be seen as the purest form of urban sport. There is some debate surrounding the sport’s origins – although most agree that Frenchman David Belle was responsible for developing the discipline in the town of Lisses, just south of Paris. Le parkour, or the art of moving, and ultimately flowing, through your environment, is a bastardisation of parcours, which means ‘course’ and comes from the obstacle courses once used in French military training.

Today, whereas the French traceurs remain relatively secretive, almost a closed circle, the UK scene is exploding. This is thanks in no small
part to Urban Freeflow (www.urbanfreeflow.co.uk), founded in 2003 by Paul Corkery. He and other parkour (PK) enthusiasts had been meeting for weekly sessions in Hackney’s Haggerston Park. In the early noughties, when attendance grew from 20 to more than 100 people every Saturday, Urban Freeflow started organising workshops to teach the basics. Following the 2005 Channel 4 documentary, Jump Britain, featuring the Seidojin team born out of the group, and the subsequent reports of copycat kids launching themselves off the roofs of multi-storey car parks, Urban Freeflow was keen to show the discipline should be practised safely and responsibly. The South Bank has now taken over as the focus for the sport, and more than 70 traceurs meet there weekly to practise their vaults, runs, precisions, jumps, balances and other acrobatic feats. Check out the Urban Freeflow website for a rundown of the techniques, details of PK workshops and to join the forum. Other well-organised groups of traceurs taking the capital by stealth include Team Seishin (www.seishin-parkour.com) and Vauxhall Tribes (www.vauxhalltribes.co.uk).

Skateboarding
It may come in and out of fashion, but skateboarding will always be one of the most challenging and aesthetically inspiring way of telling gravity he’s nothing but a big girl’s blouse. In the late 1980s, when the sport was becoming dominated by increasingly technical tricks and its mainstream popularity was in steep decline, the constellations of concrete skate parks that had appeared in the ’70s were filled in and bulldozed almost overnight. Today, spurred on by a renewed interest in the sport, due in no small part to a certain PlayStation game championed by Tony Hawk, the affable if unofficial people’s ambassador for skateboarding, skate parks are once again being built in and around London. The completely redesigned Cantelowes Skatepark (Cantelowes Gardens, Camden Road, NW1, www.cantelowesskatepark.co.uk) is set to become the hub of the north London skate scene when it reopens in May 2006 as part of a £1.5 million redevelopment of Cantelowes Gardens by Camden Council. South of the river, the Stockwell Skatepark (Stockwell Park Road, SW9, www.stockwellskatepark.com) was resurfaced in November 2005.

The irony is that now, as in the ’70s, some of the best spots to practise tend to be non-designated and often illegal. These places are spread by word of mouth; alternatively, pick up a copy of Sidewalk magazine (www.sidewalk mag.com) to see which locations are featured.
BaySixty6 (formerly the PlayStation Skate Park, Bay 65-66, Acklam Road, W10 5YU, 8969 4669, www.baysixty6.com) has revolutionised the London scene. Sheltered beneath the A40, and lent an apocalyptic air by the traffic thundering overhead, this enormous park includes three half-pipes, a mini-ramp and more funboxes, grind boxes, ledges and rails than you can shake a skateboard at. The enormous variation within the course makes it as suitable for beginners as it is addictive for old soldiers. There’s also a skate shop with plenty of equipment on sale.

If you want to take boarding to another level, you might consider trying a ‘gravity-powered’ activity. Street luge, stand up and butt boarding all basically involve hurtling yourself down steep tarmac roads on skateboard-like contraptions. For more information on the individual sports, as well as details of taster sessions and races, visit the UK Gravity Sport Association’s website (www.ukgsa.org).

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