Objects of Substance- The Climbing Wall

head of BCC Department of Recreation, but then ran a consultancy company called Strategic Leisure. Fred, as a dedicated mountaineer and rock climber, had strong links to the then fledgling indoor climbing community on a global scale and during one of our meetings with Mrs Hancock, I advised that the sports centre needed to not only address where sport currently was, but where it was going in the future and that one of the up and coming, new age sports, was Indoor Sports Climbing.” With permission to go forward from the Principal, “Mac” Stirling costed the wall at approximately $70,000. In his words: “The design was revolutionary in that plywood panels would be fixed to a lightweight steel frame as opposed to the older flat, reinforced concrete panels which only offered a vertical slab style of climbing without overhang. The DR Walls are also prefinished in a special textured epoxy paint to the plywood panels and a grid of toggled screw points enables the many different epoxy/plastic hand holds to be changed and new climbing routes designed at any time. As it turned out, our design of the BGGS Indoor Sports Centre had two 10m high reinforced tilt up slabs on the eastern end of the indoor hall building.”

1994 Construction of the climbing wall section of the Sports Centre.

Each panel is 1.2metres square making the wall 7.2 metres wide. The heights vary but, from left to right, they are approximately 12.5m, 10.5m, 10.5m, 10.5m, 11.5m, and 11.5m. This construction allowed for coloured hand holds to be moveable providing multiple climbing routes and the facility