I joined Oxford’s secret society of roof climbers

As a young man, I scaled fairground rides in Southport gales, crept over Oxford’s ancient rooftops and shimmied up drainpipes without a second thought. It’s all been downhill from there.

Author Steve Waterson

By a strange coincidence (aren’t they all?) my friend Paul last week reminded me of an ancient aerial adventure precisely as I was reading our chief culture correspondent Tim Douglas’s evocative tale of climbing to the very tip of the Sydney Opera House’s sails with Richard Tognetti, leader of the Australian Chamber Orchestra.

Paul’s note mentioned our less momentous, and much less sober, climb around the ferris wheel in Southport’s Pleasureland fairground one wild, black night as the gales drove rain sideways from the Irish Sea, our friends below howling at us to descend before we killed ourselves.

Thus limbered up, we launched what I believe was the first foul-weather ascent of the mighty Cyclone roller coaster, discovering halfway round that the combination of oil and rainwater on its steel rails and wooden slats was adding a delicious hyper-slipperiness to the challenge.

The sensible thing was to give up, but we found, as did Macbeth (though we weren’t wading in blood, but bearing only a few grazes and splinters), “returning were as tedious as go o’er”. Prospective climbers (and regicides) should note there is no painless exit from a roller coaster other than at the start/finish platform.

Does scrambling over a barbed wire-topped wall count as “breaking in”? We thought not, as our group rounded off a night of mixed success in the West End night club (the success bit was drinking many pints of beer; less successful were our subsequent attempts to charm the pretty girls dancing around their handbags).

Young people are warned that nothing good happens after 2am, but that’s a myth, spread either by early-to-bed, early-to-rise dullards or those who luxuriated in after-dark excess and doubt today’s youngsters could handle it. No, you can have marvellous fun in the small hours of the morning, and to my mind, the higher off the ground, the better.

Blessed with a good head for heights or, more accurately, one marbled with stupidity, as a small boy I discovered that my bedroom window and a nearby drainpipe afforded easy access to the roof, without alerting my parents or waking my little brother, asleep in the next bed.

Trees were a perennial favourite, particularly the park’s 40m horse chestnuts, whose branches remained stout and sturdy right to the top, their broad foliage a perfect screen from my mother calling me in at bedtime. In another place, sport climbing might have been my hobby, but coastal Lancashire is as flat as the plain of Holland, so buildings became ­irresistible man-made substitutes for nature’s rock faces.

Australian Chamber Orchestra violinist Richard Tognetti on top of the Sydney Opera House sails at dawn. Picture: Max Mason-Hubers / The Australian

It’s not something to be proud of (or is it?), but I scaled many civic buildings in my native Liverpool, once liberating from its flagpole a huge Union Jack that served as a colourful bedspread at university, where my nocturnal alpinism reached its pinnacle.

There was a secret, illicit club of roof climbers who crept over the venerable stones of Oxford’s colleges and churches, devising ingenious routes to move between them without touching the ground, and it was very easy to join: I perched on top of Hertford College’s chapel one night and waited for one of the senior members to pass by en route to All Souls, New College, or Queen’s.

Heady days, but it’s all been downhill (ha!) from there. My climbing skills deteriorated with age – I once had the agility of a mountain goat, now I’m as supple and mobile as the mountain – and sadly they didn’t translate into ascending the ladders of society, wealth or success. Even worse, I’ve developed what I self-diagnose as late-onset vicarious vertigo, an ­anxiety provoked by watching other people take risks that wouldn’t bother me for a second.

So hats off to Tim, I say. I’m still envious that he got to scramble through the tunnels and narrow staircases to emerge on the Opera House roof, but I can’t help thinking a really committed culture correspondent would have climbed it from the outside.

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