Review: Climbing at the Perse Sports Centre
Cambridge’s first1 publicly accessible roped climbing wall has recently opened!
The Perse School is a private school on Hills Road. Their shiny new Sports Centre has recently opened to the public. Here’s some details from my first visits to the centre’s roped climbing wall.
First, the basics:
- The roped section is 10.5m high with 11 lines of climbing accommodating about 35 routes. That is to say, it’s smallish
- Two of those lines are auto-belay lines
- There’s about 30 bouldering problems on the other side of the room
- There’s a ~30° digital board too
The climbing wall is operated by the school’s Outdoor Education Department, headed by Ben Parker. The whole team are really friendly, enthusiastic about this new facility, and very keen for you to have a good time at the wall. This starts with the induction that new users must book into and complete before climbing or booking further sessions.
Induction #
The induction at the Perse is the most thorough induction I’ve had at any climbing wall ever. It costs £15, pretty similar to the entry price, which I think is pretty good going considering it tends to be one instructor to about 4 climbers. On paper, it’s a box-ticking competency test, but thanks to the enthusiasm of the outdoor education team to, well, educate, it starts to resemble what other centres might call a ‘beginners 1-hour intro’ class (and charge you £30 for). For new or under-confident climbers, they’ll walk you through the process of belaying and even supervise your first belay if it comes to it. For new climbers, I think this is pretty great. One induction session likely won’t be enough to get you signed off to belay, but they’ll be sure to get you up to speed on how to use the small bouldering wall and the auto belays and you can do another induction when you’re a bit more confident (perhaps you’ve watched a few more YouTube videos, perhaps you’ve been tying figure-8s in your shoelaces) and want to get signed off for belaying.
More experienced climbers might find this induction a little tedious: although the pace is tailored to the group, it took about an hour in a group of 4 to complete it, but that time will likely come down as the process gets more rehearsed. It does mean that it’s not really a centre that an experienced climber can pop into when passing through the city, and is rather geared towards locals that can come multiple times. The induction session slot that you book is 2 hours long and you’re free to climb for the remainder of the session after the induction.
Booking #
Once you’ve completed your induction, climbs must be pre-booked in 2-hour slots and, after the next week or so, inducted users will be able to book for guests that they supervise as well, without them having to go through a full induction.
These 2-hour sessions will cost you an eye-watering £12.50 each, the same price as entry to Rainbow Rocket just round the corner which has approximately 9x the amount of bouldering that Perse has, but no ropes. Compared to other roped centres, that’s only £1 cheaper than Milton Keynes’ Big Rock Hub (4x the size of Perse), and £4 cheaper than London’s Castle Climbing Centre (11x the size of Perse), but we might not expect anything less of the only roped climbing in the city.
| Climbing Wall | Price per session | Max session length | Approx number of roped routes2 |
|---|---|---|---|
| The Castle Climbing Centre, London | £16.50 (£14.50 when bulk-buying) | 1 day | 380 |
| Big Rock Hub, Milton Keynes | £13.50 (£12.15 when bulk-buying) | 1 day | 135 |
| The Perse Sports Centre, Cambridge | £12.50 | 2 hours | 35 |
Sessions being pre-booked allows the centre to cap the capacity at around 20 climbers, which is for the best in a centre of this size.
Routes and Climbing #
Let’s talk about route-setting. So far, the vast majority of the routes at the wall are those initially set by the manufacturer, Rockworks, predominantly with their own-brand holds. The grading is soft and the routes are mostly, to be honest, relatively unmemorable.
Going forward, the route-setting is to be done in-house by Ben, Kit and Matt: not veteran route-setters, but clearly motivated and excited to keep it interesting. They intend to set a few routes each week. In their first week of in-house setting, they managed to get a new roped route up as well as about 3 new bouldering routes. Not bad for their first session of setting at this height! At this frequency of setting, climbers might expect to get a decent visit once a fortnight or so.
I’m excited to see the setting team hit their stride, and expect that we’ll see routes getting more interesting as they steadily get more of their stash of Holdz-branded holds and volumes out the store-cupboard and gain from experience and feedback on the route-setting.
Another decision to make efficient use of the space is to allow lead climbing on every roped line including the auto-belay lines. Users are asked to remove the gym’s top rope and lead with their own rope, carrying the top rope back up with them on a gear loop. It’s been a while since I’ve come across this in a gym, and it obviously requires you to be a bit careful, but I think it is well-suited to the space. It is a little awkward especially because your lead rope and the gym’s top rope have to share an anchor at the top, but I’m told that separate lead-rope anchors will be installed at the top of each line to make this easier.
One slightly odd feature is the way the speed timers work on the auto-belay lines. The start button is at the entrance door, not at the bottom of the route, and so has to be operated by someone else. So whilst it’s definitely more fun and spectacular than your friend timing you on their phone, it’s not much more precise or convenient. Hopefully they’ll one day find a way to have a start trigger at the bottom of the wall and some kind of countdown.
The Digital board at the end of the bouldering area is a fun, welcome addition to that area. At a roughly 30° angle, it’s some of the steepest climbing the room has to offer, and it’s just kinda fun to look through the routes on this knowing that they’re set by other wall-users (mostly actually students at the Perse School, I’m told). The software could use some work, the photo preview of the route wasn’t working for me, and it’s hard to tell which routes are going to be any good at the moment, perhaps a log of how many people have ticked a given route would help, but it’s all good fun.
Once you’re done climbing, there’s a pull-up bar and hangboard to finish off your upper body for the day, but unfortunately no dedicated space for stretching, so you’ll have to sneak your lunges in whatever quiet corner you can find.
Training and courses #
I think this could be a great spot for teaching friends new climbing and rope skills before your first outdoor trip together. With a ground-level anchor, you can easily practice tying off for cleaning an outdoor sport route or even setting up an abseil. There is even an abseil platform from which you could safely practice your abseiling if you ask the staff nicely to allow you to use it.
In terms of actual courses, Perse will be offering National Indoor Climbing Award Schemes (NICAS) for under 18s, which they’ll be offering levels 1-3, similar to what’s currently on offer over at Climb Hitchin, but obviously more convenient for the young climbers of Cambridge. They also intend to have a set of other sessions and courses including a session for adults to learn to lead climb indoors.
Overall #
It’s a huge win to finally have some roped climbing opportunity in Cambridge, even at this modest scale. The Perse are clearly investing seriously in this section of their new Sports Centre and it’s a nice complement to the larger, more commercial bouldering opportunity round the corner at Rainbow Rocket. The team seem very excited about it and I’m confident that they’ll do a stellar job of running it, with a particular focus on young climbers. Route-setting could make or break the sustained interest here, and I’ll be rooting (ha) for the team as they get up to speed.
Aside from this, I believe Cambridge could easily support a roped climbing centre 4 times the size of the Perse and, if you agree, you can join us in advocating for more access to roped climbing in the city over at The Cambridge Arch Project.
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at least, the first for a long while, and the first that would be considered an option for the sport climbers of today ↩
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Numbers gathered from these centres websites. To be honest, a more useful comparison might be the number of routes set per month at each centre, but it’s a little harder to get a hold of that info ↩