The Story so far…
In January 2014, I started teaching parkour full time in Edinburgh in a desperate attempt to get away from what was, looking back on it, a fairly horrendous PhD position where I was extremely unhappy. Parkour had been a huge part of my life for the past few years, I’d been delivering classes with Fife Parkour Coaching for around 4 years and I felt like I could really make a difference.
I started with a few friends, Gordon Tsang, Adam Romaine and David Bharrat. And in May 2015 we started a company, Access Parkour Ltd. We didn’t really know what we were doing, so we made it as simple as possible, a Ltd company where I was the majority shareholder. We learned how to become great coaches, while puzzling out Risk Assessments, employment, health and safety, booking systems and payment systems. We bought equipment and worked out of a circus centre for 18 months before taking the plunge in October 2016 and signing a lease on our very own building, Room to Move.
We became industry experts in delivering parkour to children, focused on rehabilitation and introductory movement sessions and explored and developed our own niches.
Bristo Square, 2014. Photographer unknown
We wrote a Teacher Training course which was adopted by the national governing body and became industry standard. We travelled to over a dozen countries to teach parkour.
And we had so many amazing coaches come through out doors. Some only stayed for a few months while travelling. Other stayed for years, grew and developed as people while they were here. Others never left. And I am grateful to every single one of them:
The Coaching Team:
Adam Romaine, Gordon Tsang, David Bharrat, Richard Sue, Natalia Boltukhova, Luke Aquilina, Daniel Lumsden, Kirsten Altenbach, Donald Dalziel, Chris Martin, Panda Ilen, Rory Ferguson, Sonia Marhsall, Yannik Nelson, Calum Archibald, Nina Ballantyne, Sandi Banovic, Seb Koci, Maebh Rice, Klo Fillion, Stefano Sardano, Amelia Penfold, Dylan Jones, Joel Howells and Matt Jones
And of course, the truth is that I was never properly able to run the company all that well myself and have always had help. Mel Aghanya spent 6 years as the company administrator, guiding me through the complexities of owning a business while going out of her way to make sure it all worked. And when she moved on, back into full time work, we wished her well and struggled to comprehend the sheer scale of what she’d done for us.
Nina took over as General Manager in 2021, and then Kirsten joined as the administrator in 2022 and these days it’s fair to say they’re now as much Access as I am. Together, we have hatched a plot to take Access Parkour forward as a Community Interest Company. Doing our best to let the little company we all built together grow up into something that will keep changing lives, day after day.
And so now we’re looking forward to the future. The next steps. Whatever comes, the journey so far has been wonderful.