How we got here

Many of us were waiting for someone else to build a climbing facility in Stroud and became fed up of waiting. So we naively began scheming a plan with a vision — what would it take to make climbing more accessible, bring down the cost, and make it easily replicable in other communities?

We were inspired by shipping containers. Cheap, modular, stackable, transportable. We imagined having a workshop inside for making our own wooden holds — a modular wall on the outside, dismountable and transportable. Manufactured in Stroud and shipped to communities worldwide, scaling to whatever size and shape they see fit.

We proposed to the council a set of permanent outdoor boulders next to the skate park and the tennis court at Stratford Park. The initial cost of installation was high but it's very low maintenance and free to climb for the whole community.

We came very close to building the gym in 2024 when we saw the potential in an 800 square foot industrial unit. This spurred us into months of negotiations with insurers to get the key card access model approved through the Super Induction. With generous help from industry supporters, the research process gave us the knowledge and confidence that we could pull this off. Alas, the friction in the payment rail meant our first crowdfunding fell short and we stepped back.

Running alongside everything else was a deeper question — how do you own and govern an asset as a community? We assessed coops, CICs, charities and community benefit societies. We experimented with do-ocracy, sociocratic consent-based governance, and community volunteer pools. We believe in the principles of commoning as defined by Elinor Ostrom and hope to transition to a multistakeholder model where users, investors and stewards all have a say.

The Grace Network and The Long Table had been supportive of our project from the beginning — providing space for community meetings and sharing our values around community ownership and social impact. We're excited to be nested within their thriving hub. The current location is a pilot space, with a larger building within the complex being renovated for future use.

From empty space to climbing wall — built by the community, for the community. Our Instagram documents the build phase in detail if you want to see every step of the journey.