The Concrete Church Reclaimed as a Climbing Gym

The nave holds forty routes now, and the congregation still meets on Sunday mornings before the walls open.

Buildings of this kind are rarely decided by architects alone. A structural engineer, a planning officer and a facilities manager who will never be named in the credits each moved this one several metres from where it started, and the drawings record the argument.

Rena Osei, who climbed two of the easier routes badly, has been close to it from the start.

Background

Nothing is bolted into the original concrete. The climbing structure is a freestanding steel frame that touches the building in four places.

Budget was fixed before the brief was finished, which is the wrong order and, everyone involved agrees, the usual one.

The acoustics, designed for organ and voice, are terrible for a gym and nobody has tried to fix them.

We are tenants in someone else's room. That changes every decision you make.

the gym's founder

The method

The arrangement is written into the lease: the frame can be removed in a fortnight, and the building returns to what it was.

What stops this being a one-off is the documentation. The practice has published the details, which means the next team does not have to rediscover the same three failures.

The first week brought the kind of attention nobody plans for, and the second brought the criticism that actually changed something.

There is no shortage of people willing to call it inevitable in hindsight. Nobody involved describes it that way.

Where it goes

Sunday service at nine. Climbing from eleven.