Chalk
A climber on a steep limestone cliff high above a green valley.

Bouldering only · no ropes · four metres

An indoor wall that would rather you were outside by August

Two hundred problems, reset a wall a week, in a grain store with a plywood floor and no music. Everything we teach is aimed at the day you drive an hour and do it on actual rock.

What it costs
200problems set
4 mhighest wall
1wall reset a week
38°steepest board
0ropes in the building

What it costs

Shoes are three pounds and chalk is free out of a bucket. There is no membership that makes sense unless you come twice a week, and we will tell you that at the desk.

Two people raising their hands against a bright sky.

One session

All day, in and out as you like. Nobody is ever asked to leave because the session is over — we have never once had to.

£11 · £8 before 16:00

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The first six weeks

Six Tuesday evenings with a coach, shoes included, eight people. It is the only course we run and it is the reason most of the regulars are regulars.

£90 for all six

A single red dumbbell on a pale blue background.

Every week

Unlimited, month to month, cancel by text. Includes the training board, which is behind a door and should stay that way for your first year.

£46 a month

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Falling

This is the thing nobody puts on a climbing wall's website and the thing that decides whether somebody comes back. Four metres is not high and it does not feel like that from the top.

You will fall, a lot
Bouldering is falling with a bit of climbing in between. Everybody in the building fell off something in the last ten minutes, including the ones who look like they didn't.
Learn it in the first hour
Land on your feet, roll backwards, hands in. Somebody will show you in five minutes on a mat eighty centimetres off the floor, free, whether you asked or not.
Do not climb down
Half of all injuries here happen on the way down from a problem somebody had already finished. Drop off. The mat is thirty centimetres thick.
Never under somebody
The one rule with no flexibility in it. Look up before you walk anywhere on the matting.
It is normal to be scared at three metres
It is also normal to be fine at three metres in October and frightened again in March. Everybody's height tolerance moves around and nobody talks about it.
Ankles, wrists, skin
In that order, and almost all of it is from bad landings rather than hard climbing. Eleven ambulances in nine years, all of them ankles.

Under-eighteens climb with an adult, under-twelves on the low wall only, and both of those are on the wall by the door in letters far bigger than this.

Getting outside

A minibus, twice a month from April, to the same four crags. Nine pounds, bring lunch, back by seven. It loses money and it is the point of the building.

Trips a yearfourteen

Cost£9, pads and helmets lent

Cragsfour, all within 90 minutes

First-timers welcomeon all fourteen

Members who climb outside nowabout a third

Ask about the next one
A person in a yellow jumpsuit standing beside a plain wall.
A climber moving across a steep rock face.

A grain store, and what we did to it

Built in 1911, empty from 1988, and full of pigeons until 2016. The walls are ply on a steel frame that sits inside the building without touching it, which is why the whole thing does not shake when somebody falls off the 38.

No music, no café, no shop beyond shoes and chalk. There is a kettle, a tap and about forty mugs that all came from somebody's kitchen.