clovehitched | Awesome New Climbing Wall

In my post about the couple of days we recently spent in the San Francisco bay area, I enthused about the climbing gym our gracious hosts,

parmonster and

gentle_gamer took us to, Planet Granite, which was much larger than our "local" climbing gym at Harlow and which I really enoyed for its cleverly textured walls and fun, varied and inventive climbing routes. I went home lamenting not having a similar establishment nearby.

Well,

the_local_echo has been doing some googling, and it turns out that the city that has pretty much everything, London, does indeed have such an establishment. What's more, it looks like this:

It's a Victorian former pumping station, but was built to look like a castle, in that way the Victorians liked to do. Appropriately enough, it's therefore called The Castle Climbing Centre, and it is huge. The photograph doesn't really convey the impact this building has as you approach it on an otherwise nondescript London inner suburban street. That tower at the back is 150 feet high, to give you an idea.

We really liked what we saw on their website, so Sylvia and I checked it out yesterday afternoon. We arrived there and expressed an interest in joining. The friendly reception staff asked if we had any experience, to which we replied that we were members at Harlow, and asked if we knew how to put a climbing harness on, tie-in, and correctly belay. We both replied that we did, were given consent/rules forms to read and sign, and on doing so were presented with our membership cards, or rather, we would have been presented with them were their printer working. Apparently we can pick them up next time.

With no further ceremony, we headed off to the ladies' changing rooms, geared up, and hit the climbing routes.

The first thing I noticed was that there was a lot of space dedicated to bouldering. There's no dedicated bouldering section at Harlow, and we could immediately see that The Castle had some on the round floor, and a mezzanine level entirely dedicated to bouldering (there's a floor plan here). It's not something I've got into at all yet, but perhaps this will encourage me to try. There were plenty of climbing routes dotted around, however, all on lovely textured walls, with cracks and arêtes, similar to the inventively sculptured walls we'd encountered in California, which promised much more interesting climbing that merely clambering around on what always look to me like oversized bits of chewing gum stuck to walls.

We climbed on the walls downstairs for a bit, and were pleased to note that the ratings seemed very consistent. I was able to consistently climb the 5 (Sports grade) (5.9 in YDS) routes with ease, and consistently got up the 5+ (5.10a) routes, but found them a little more "entertaining". Sylvia consistently found the same thing with the 4 (5.7) and 4+ (5.8) routes. The few 6a (5.10b) routes I tried were very tough and I tended to fall off them. This seemed to match my experience at Planet Granite, and has given me an appreciation for what people mean when they say the routes at Harlow are graded "on crack".

After a bit we decided to head upstairs to the cafe, to quench our thirst, and climbed the iron stairs up past the mezzanine bouldering area. When we entered the cafe area on the top floor, we were amazed to see a whole other floor full of climbing routes, both or lead climbing and top roping, which were even higher than the ones downstairs. Better still, we could sit on the sofas in the cafe area and watch people being impressive on the lead climbing wall, going up seemingly impossible routes and deploying their rope as they go (one day, one day)!

I think we spent about 3 hours doing climbing routes (they have 450 of them apparently, from 90 rope stations), before declaring ourselves exhausted, and trying a couple of simple bouldering routes to wind down. I'd not tried proper bouldering before, and I quickly got the impression that it requires some very different techniques from the climbing I've been accustomed to so far. I didn't get very far, not having started to develop any of the specific skills I needed, and after watching me repeatedly attempt, and fall off one relatively simple route, a muscular young man who'd been watching leapt up and decided to show Sylvia and me how it was done (how rugged!)

He fell off, adopted a bit of an "oh crap, there goes my chance of a shag" look, muttered something about being tired and wandered off, with apparently injured pride. I felt a bit sorry for him, but he did demonstrate some interesting bouldering moves which I'm keen to look at trying next time, so his efforts were not unappreciated.

Anyway, we've determined that the place is utterly awesome, and is very much like the gym in California that we so enjoyed. We'll definitely be back, especially since they have their "women with altitude" night on our regular climbing night, Monday, where they have female instructors around to help provide a female-friendly environment for sharing experience and advice.

They even have a little climbing wall for kids, which is handy because unlike Harlow, they have separate classrooms for teaching beginners and so don't have any routes on their main wall rated below a 4/5.7 (although there is one 4 rated route we found which was clearly intended to be a "starter" route, and was the only real example we found of a route which we both agreed was probably misrated.

The only question is, given it doesn't take much longer to get to by train, and is apparently considerably more awesome, will we be going to Harlow any more?

Originally posted at http://auntysarah.dreamwidth.org/204419.html - you can comment here or there.