Continued ...
Our next stop was number 106 Pall Mall home of the Travellers club, for which you have to proove that you have travelled at least 500 miles from London in order to be eligable. We continued our balancing act further down Pall Mall and along the front of a variety of exclusive buildings. Occasionally we would have to resort to climbing the walls of the buildings in order to make it past windows and doors.
We then hit an impasse with a large refurbishment going on to the front of the building and a huge scaffolding attached to the side. Not to be put off several of our group scaled the scaffolding and went via the overhead walkways on the second floor, others swung from the beams and wooden cladding, and others still leapt from wooden block to wooden block set in the road to keep out traffic.
Unfortunately this all attracted not only the clubs security, but a riot van of bored Policemen. We held fast with our rules and all balanced on and hung from things whilst talking with the Police. After a while it seemed that there was nothing much that they could actually arrest us for:
"Look, if you carry on with this climbing around, well, erm? well we are going to keep being called out to come and see you"
We eventually agreed with the leading officer that we would climb no higher than a metre from the floor for the rest of our tour, and he said that we could continue. At no point did any one of us actually have to touch the floor during our encounter with the Police. Although they did warn us that there were a lot of 'sensitive buildings' in the area, and that if we climbed Clarence House or St James' Palace that we would all be shot!
This unfortunately ruled out the finale of the tour, but we carried on regardless, crossing the road to a hotel and climbing past an irate looking doorman with a riot van of Police leaving us to it. We climbed along the wall and into St James Sq. This was once the home of Ada Lovelace, daughter of the poet Lord Byron, and creator of the first ever computer programme.
Turning left we headed into King St, by this point we were all beginning to fade a bit, however we took a deep breath and continued, some climbing the right and some climbing the left hand side of the road. We travelled along the window sills of a fine art dealers, around the doors of offices and along the wall opposite Christies auction house. The doorman from Christies came out to inform us that we were all mental and needed locking up, which I thought was nice of him.
However with weary limbs, dirty hands and plenty of bruises we all finally
made it to the Golden Lion pub. Enough was enough and our tour was terminated
here for refreshments and crisps. Quadroupling the custom of the pub our dirty
band of sweaty explorers collapsed in the chairs and toasted our adventure with
drinks in hand.
More tours will be planned soon.