This week's Friday Night Video is an in-depth look at the evolution of indoor bouldering walls by YouTuber Hannah Morris. As the discipline soars in popularity, we are in a golden age for indoor bouldering.
There are a staggering 20,000+ climbing gyms worldwide and 38 bouldering gyms in London alone - with new facilities opening every year.
Hannah explores how both the physical spaces of bouldering gyms and the communities that form in them have changed by visiting the oldest and newest dedicated centres in the UK: the Mile End Climbing Wall and The Climbing Hangar Edinburgh, built in 1980 and 2024 respectively.
Comments
I'm sorry Hannah. You should have talked to more people. This is a misrepresentation of the history of climbing walls.
Mile End, as KPS said above, was hardly the first dedicated climbing centre, bouldering or lead.
I worked with the late Andy Reid (Mile End boss), and Graham Desroy at DR Cimbing Walls, at Mile End, in the late 80s. Putting up some of the first panel/resin panels...the French got there first (Pyramid).
Those concrete blocks, I probably set them. The rocks in them I used to gather from Hodge Close and Leicester quarries. Please don't ever use them for gear placements as the current manager said. Very few ever did (apart from Ken Wilson).
Still, your basic premise is great, gyms/walls today are amazing and life changing.
This was really spoiled by the advert and coupon code. I almost switched off.
Mick Ryan
"in-depth look at climbing walls..."
Really, Natalie. I don't think so.
Llangefni, Rothwell, Plas y Brenin were going in the 70's
Rothwell and Dicky Dunns were in council leisure centres. Leeds uni would have only been accessed by students or staff. They weren't dedicated climbing centres in the same way as mile end - open to the general public *and* primarily focused on climbing