On 19th March 2009, the charity Shelter will be holding a charity run, up the stairs of Tower 42 in the City of London. This is an unconventional direction for a charity run, for such runs are normally carried out in the horizontal plane, at ground level. Vertical runs have been in currency in the USA for some years, but they are a novelty in the UK, and Shelter claims this to be first in this country.
The venue, Tower 42, is the tallest building in the City of London, a rectilinear counterpart to the curvaceous bulk of the nearby Swiss Re buiding ("the Gherkin"). To get an idea of what is involved, read Times journalist Valentine Low's report on running up the stairway here. (Also, if you are curious about the building, check out this web site: Google Earth Tower 42.)
The purpose of the event is to raise money and publicity for Shelter, the charity for helping homeless people. If you click on this link to this on the right, you can find out more about this event, and make a sponsorship donation electronically, which goes directly to Shelter. You can also see Shelter's promotional video on youtube,com. This shows their smart computer animation of houses of cards falling apart, embedded in roving footage of Shepherd's Bush. The background music is a plaintive piano piece by Radiohead, (athough the track is ironically "Videotape", not "House of Cards"). The copy line for this 'promo vid' is that this year, 75,000 homes will be repossessed. Of course, repossessions are increasing this year owing the recession, and a lot of households are going down the chute, more than would normally be the case. Shelter doesn't house people, but it does provide assistance to get people on their feet again.
I was prompted to take part in this run, in memory of Ursula Bahler, known as 'Ushi'. Ushi lived for 37 years in Sumatra Road, West Hampstead, a street where I also live for about ten years with my wife Deborah Marshall-Warren. In the year 2000, she was made homeless and thrown onto the street by bailiffs because of a dispute with her step-children over her late husband's will. In protest, she camped on the door step until she died of pneumonia in March 2004, five years ago this month. Ushi was not a beggar, and she declined Camden Council's offer of accommodation in Kentish Town: she took the principled stand that her home was rightfully hers and she would not budge from the doorstep. Well, you might say, that's a unique case. Yes. but every homeless person is a unique case in one way or another.
You can read more about Ushi by clicking here.
Ushi in Benchmarks column in TimeOut magazine
Ushi will soon be appearing in the Benchmarks column in TimeOut. The origins of this unique column is itself another story ... In 2006, Stephen Emms had an short piece published in the Ham & High about a bench dedicated to Max Sondheimer in Hampstead Heath. Out of this grew a regular blog, at benchpoetry.blogspot.com, in which he records the stories behind dedicated benches. He had several further pieces published in the Ham & High, the Times, and The Herald. And then he began a regular column in the pre-eminent London listings magazine, Time Out. When I came across this weekly column, I wrote to Stephen about Ushi, and he has kindly agreed to include Ushi's bench, both in the Timeout column and in the blog.
Obviously, one needs to do put in a spot of training for sprint like this Vertical Rush charity run for Shelter, and the conventional place would be a gym. But I am not currenty a member of a gym (can't afford it at the moment), so I am training for Vertical Rush by running up and down the stairs of the deepest Tube stations I coud find.
In fact, Hampstead Tube station is the deepest underground railway station in London. I've been doing some other stations too (Covent Garden and Caledonian Road), but Hampstead Tube is best, as it gives the longest run (320 steps). In any case, running in a gym is boring unless you can get into one of those really swish ones. Running up the Victorian steps of a 102-year-old underground railway station is a far more intriguing way of building up leg muscles.
Stepping up in Hampstead
3 x 320 steps = 960 steps, just over the height of Tower 42. So, the training schedule is: jog up the stairs, go down the lift; walk up the stairs a second time, go down the lift, take off pullover and coat and carry them; stagger up the stairs a third time; then wander out into Hampstead High Street in search of refreshments. If I'm lucky, the Community Hall is open with its Saturday market -- there is a very good vegan food and drink stall there.
I have uploaded some snapshots of these underground training spaces here.
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