Some days exciting things just happen, and some days you have to go out of your way to make them happen. Last Thursday was the second type of day.
Alex, St Thomas' Hospital Roof
At noon I was still sat in my boxers checking my emails – which had subsequently turned into trawling Facebook, Twitter, various news websites etc, as tends to happen slightly too often for my liking. Flicking back to Facebook for the hundredth time that morning, I was duly informed that two of my largest, and hairiest, male friends had ‘Become a fan of Rough Sex’.
“Jesus Christ”, I thought. I need to get out of this house and away from this goddamn screen. I knew that one more mental image like that of the two grizzly-fatties riding each other violently through the night, may finally drive me to gauge my eyes out in an attempt to ‘un-see’ such a disturbing, wrong, and unnecessary piece of information.
Throwing on a pair of shorts and a t-shirt as quickly as I could, I grabbed my camera and headed out in the city. The fresh, albeit contaminated, city air filled me with a sudden sense of optimism, and still rubbing the sleep out of my eyes I headed for the nearest tube station.
Until I entered the station it hadn’t occurred to me that I had still to make a decision on where exactly I was going to spend the rest of this beautiful summer afternoon. A quick scan of the tube map prompted me to remember that the ‘Press Photographer’s Year’ exhibition was open at the National Theatre in South Bank, which sounded like a decent enough option to me.
After a fiendishly hot and stuffy tube journey, which at times made me wonder if I was heading to South Bank or Auschwitz, I scrambled up the escalator and out into blue skies and sunshine. I crossed the Thames via footbridge and proceeded along the riverside, stopping every so often to watch some of the many buskers whom occupy most of the pathway in that area.
Drawing close to the National Theatre, I headed up a flight of concrete stairs and as I rounded the corner at the top of the stairs, I was almost decapitated by what I immediately suspected to be a ninja. I paused for a second to work out what had just happened. I knew I had scaled the stairs, I knew that I had rounded the corner… then… wait… did a black guy with a huge afro really just front flip over me? Turns out he did. And little did I know that this close-encounter was to spark a change in my plans for the rest of the afternoon.
I glanced around to see where the flying afro was. Gone. Not a trace of it anywhere. Then suddenly, over the top of a great concrete wall the mass of hair came flying, head first, towards the ground, landing casually on his feet a few metres away. Just by looking at this wild character, and seeing him bound effortlessly across the concrete, I could tell that I too had fallen on my feet.
I recognised parkour, or ‘free running’ as it is sometimes known, when I saw it. A relatively new urban sport which originated in France less than a decade ago. The French sometimes refer to it as “l’art du déplacement”, which in English translates to “the art of movement”, and if you are not already familiar with it, it basically involves skilfully hurling yourself around a city environment, flipping over bollards, jumping from walls, and running across rooftops being just a few of its defining features. Parkour is so visually impressive that over the past 5 years it has been hijacked on numerous occasions by hipsters in marketing departments around the world to try and make their often mindless media product seem both exciting and contemporary.
You may recognise the sport from anything from music videos, to computer games, to films. Even the BBC ran a popular ‘ident’ featuring Frenchman David Belle (credited as the founder of parkour) hurtling across the rooftops of London in order to get home from work. With all this in mind, I knew I wasn’t going to break any ground by covering parkour in the magazine, but I knew I would be able to get some decent photos out it at the very least.
“Hey!” I shouted, eager to catch him before he vanished over the top of a wall which he was scaling. “Hey! Excuse me! I’m working on a magazine. Arts! Music! Urban culture!” I yelled, “Would you mind if I take a few photos?”. The huge haircut shook from side to side and the owner launched himself from yet another perilously high drop. Landing a few feet away. I approached, and shook his hand. He had the hands of a builder. Coarse and rough to the touch, almost as if that by handling bricks all day, their hands have been infected by the masonry itself.
“My name’s John” I said, “Could I take a few photos of you doing parkour”. “Of course” he replied in an accent which I couldn’t quite place. The voice was European, I knew that much. The look on my face was apparently one of a man struggling to place an accent, and this was no doubt what prompted him to speak further. “I am from the Netherlands. My name is Alex. Pleased to meet you”, he said awkwardly.
“Netherlands eh?” I thought. What little I know about Holland was learned in a weekend which I spent in Amsterdam for my birthday a couple of years ago, during which I travelled on an expired passport, stayed in a hovel, forgot almost everything I knew including the PIN number for my bank card, and watched a woman at a ‘live show’ perform unspeakable acts on stage, involving a banana and one of my close friends. “…Probably just the kind of activity that citizens of the Netherlands despise”.
“Ohh Holland eh?” I said, trying to think of something quickly to move the conversation on. “Yeah” replied Alex, “Have you been?”. Balls… “Yes, I visited briefly once” I said distractedly. “Amsterdam?” Alex said, with a knowing smile. “Errrm yes, yes it was Amsterdam, lovely city, beautiful architecture.” – I felt like Basil Faulty up against Sybil. He could see right through me. He knew what I’d been doing in Amsterdam, he knew about the passport, and the PIN number, and even the banana. How did he know? Because it’s the same debauched tomfoolery that every other Brit he has met who has admitted to visiting his home-country has partaken in on your average ‘architecture admiration’ visit to the Netherlands.
After a short absence, the journalist in me kicked back in. “So… Alex, how long have you been doing parkour for?”, “About three years, I saw a video of it on TV and thought ‘I have to do this’”. At that point, he took off, sprinting towards a low wall. At the last second he jumped up onto the wall, and somersaulted cleanly forward, with his afro pulsing in the breeze.
Alex, South Bank
For the next 15 minutes we didn’t talk much. There was a mutual understanding. He knew that I wanted some dramatic action shots of his acrobatics, I knew that he wanted to be left undirected – freerunning in the true sense of the term, with no artistic direction, just the will to move.
I snapped some photos of him, doing my best to anticipate which part of the immediate urban jungle he might employ in his next stunt.
In between vaults and flips, it was fascinating to watch Alex’s face. Nestled in the cushion of hair, his expression was that of a musician waiting for their part in a tune. A look of patience, with a palpable edge of concentration. Waiting for the exact second in which it is their turn to take the spotlight. Alex however had no audience to burst into spontaneous applause when his tricks were performed flawlessly. Occasionally a passing family or businessman would pause for just long enough to watch Alex hurtle gracefully from walls to rooftops in this area which had become his domain, but there was no reward for his daredevil acts, other than the clear satisfaction he got from landing cleanly on his feet.
In that moment, watching Alex flying from pillar to post, I saw the city in an altogether different way. From Alex’s perspective, looking out from beneath that huge haircut, each element of the city looked like a piece of play equipment in the biggest playground in England. The bollards weren’t there to stop cars – they were there to be vaulted, low walls weren’t barriers – they were for flipping from, while high walls were for scaling up, and leaping off.
“I’m bored” remarked Alex, shattering my somewhat romanticised view of his sport. “I know this other place… a rooftop. We could go there”. “Sure, why not” I replied. My plans to visit the ‘Press Photographer’s Year’ exhibition were, by this point, as forgotten as my PIN number on that cold weekend in Amsterdam.
Sometimes, you just have to go with your gut, and my gut was telling me to accompany Alex to the rooftop. Sometimes though your brain has to kick in and point out the blindingly obvious; how the hell am I going to make it onto a rooftop? I may be a photographer, but unfortunately I’m not Peter Parker, and while Alex may have the gift of flight, I have not developed such dramatically physical skills. I decided to worry about this problem later, putting it to the back of my mind as I talked some more with Alex.
He told me that he was flying home to Holland the next day, he told me that he had spent the last two weeks surfing in Newquay with friends, and he told me that he was a member of a parkour ‘crew’ back in the Netherlands. He handed me a business card from his pocket which detailed his crew’s website, and went on to tell me about the work him and his crew had done for advertising agencies. This made me smile, but I hid it, and let him carry on with his tales. They were of his travels with friends around Europe, and of his hopes to visit Sydney, New York, and Beijing, clearly eager to see what each new playground had to offer.
Alex, St Thomas' Hospital Roof
We made our way along the riverside, before climbing up onto a wall a few feet taller than myself and then swinging under fences which intersected the wall top and jutted out over a drop. Every time we reached a fence he would leap over it, then I would hand him my rucksack and scramble clumsily after him, grazing my wrist and both my knees as we proceeded. Finally we reached the building which supported the rooftop he loved so much. A large dilapidated sign on the building’s wall stated it was ‘St Thomas’ Hospital’, although this was clearly an abandoned, older, and thankfully slightly lower wing than the towering hospital itself.
Alex ran along a wall-top and jumped over an alleyway, grabbing onto the roof of the hospital at the last second and pulling himself up. “Bugger” I thought, “This could be where we part ways”. After a minute of scouting around, I spotted a window with thick bars, both vertical and horizontal, covering it – an ideal ladder for an amateur urban explorer such as myself. I climbed up the bars to roof height and then realised that I had to make a step across a gap slightly longer than I was comfortable with, or capable of, making. Alex reached across, holding out a granite hand. “Trust me” he said, his European accent and choice of words instantly reminded me of something from an Arnold Schwarzenegger action film, but it was no time for laughing.
I may have only known him for less than an hour, but I did trust him. “If I didn’t trust him, I wouldn’t be halfway up this building in the first place”, I thought to myself. I reached out and grabbed his hand and was subsequently hauled by my arm onto the rooftop. “Thank god for that” I sighed. During the ascent, I had had a feeling that I can only liken to how an old woman must feel watching teenagers charge up a flight of stairs. Alex had been on the rooftop in a split second, while I had taken about 5 minutes to haul my body up the window bars and had ultimately needed his help to drag me to the summit.
“He’s the freerunner, I’m the journalist” I told myself. “I’m not meant to be charging up onto hospital roofs… a couple of hours ago I was just sat in my boxers on Facebook”. This thought made me cherish the freedom which the rooftop offered. I must’ve shot a hundred photos on that rooftop, but not one of them could possibly fully capture the spirit of that boiling summer afternoon. After an hour or so of shooting, Alex was shattered. His decent from the rooftop was as rapid as his accent and mine was just as slow, awkward, and painful as before.
In the shade of the old hospital I shook his hand once more and wished him a safe journey back to the Netherlands. I was heading to one tube station, he was heading to another, and after exchanging email addresses we parted ways almost as quickly as we had met, only with fewer somersaults.
Some days exciting things just happen, and some days you have to go out of your way to make them happen. Last Thursday was the second type of day.
