Planner's Comments

It was nice to realise my idea of bringing the city race concept, so successfully executed in Oxford, Edinburgh and other cities around the UK, to London. Things got moving after a Street-O which was held in the same area in August 2007, and after a year and a bit, we finally had an event.

As is inevitable in an area as complex and changing as the City, there were some unanticipated events on the day.

• There's always a lot of cranes around at the weekends in the City, but this particular weekend seems to have been especially full of very large ones. We had the work orders and, in theory, all cranes should have been passable on the pavements, but still would have required detours when crossing the road.
• A passageway was blocked by construction work, on the approach to Leadenhall Market. This had been open before while construction was taking place, but they blocked it off on the day itself.
• A wedding reception outside St Paul's Cathedral impeded later Men's Open runners taking the northern route around the cathedral, with some choosing to get in the wedding shots and others taking a route a little further to the north.
• Parts of the Gherkin plaza were unexpectedly blocked off by maintenance workers during part of the morning, particularly affecting runners starting in the last half-hour, requiring a longer, but hopefully spectacular, route around the iconic building to get to the control.

Flights of stairs sometimes were longer than they looked on the map - i initially used a special symbol to show stairwells, as used at Lincoln, but decided in the end that showing a stairwell as steps was easier to read - if hard to judge the time taken going down/up.

The Barbican was always a challenge to map - and in fact quite a lot of the out-of-bounds areas are public walkways, but would have made the map too complex if they had been shown as legal routes. It was always going to be tricky finding the right balance between clarity and completeness, and I know at least one person who spent some considerable time in the largely unmarked underground "road level" parts of the complex. In general, the highest, or "podium" level was the one shown.

This map shows the tunnels that were not marked, as well as the different levels. Orange lines show the "road level" tunnels concerned, and red lines similarly show the tunnels connecting the 4m high south podium, which is shaded pink. Adding these to the map produced a mass of dots, making the "main running level" of the north podium harder to read. It is certainly an area that would benefit from a larger scale, should everything need to be shown.
Some controls were not attached to the feature in the control descriptions, but on an unmapped object, such as a pillar, bench or lamppost, which was no more than a metre away. Strictly, this is bad practice. The features themselves could not be mapped at this scale without cluttering the map. One idea was to drag out the wire from the secured point to the feature, but this would have created a trip hazard. Making the controls more visible to someone looking at the mapped feature might be a compromise for future events where an alternative site is not possible.

Sorry for the lack of loose control descriptions - the control code numbers were wrong, a cock-up on my part.

There were quite a high number of M55+ DSQs - possibly due to the control numbers being quite difficult to read against the building colour? The controller did suggest white borders for the numbers, which I couldn't do in the Purple Pen application used for planning. Colours were also tweaked - the buildings were slightly darker, and the underpasses slightly lighter, than the ISSOM spec. This aimed to emphasise the passable routes in the intricate Cornhill area, but also made the underpasses difficult to distinguish from the pavement colour - which looked browner on the screen than it ended up on the printed copies. The process (Illustrator -> Purple Pen -> EPS -> Illustrator -> PDF -> printer) didn't allow the printer to tweak the colours.

The times were generally slightly faster than anticipated - the good weather presumably helped. I hope everyone enjoyed the impressive Broadgate Arena - it was a real coup staging an orienteering event in such a prestigious venue and I thank the organisers (Brooner and Vince) for securing and setting up the dramatic space.

I greatly enjoyed creating the map and planning the courses - it was a real labour of love. I look forward to future urban orienteering races in iconic places like the City. The map doesn't in fact include all of the City - there is a large part to the west which includes the intricate alleyways north of Fleet Street, and the gardens, passageways and courts of the Middle and Inner Temple. The other obvious extension for a future race would be to include Bankside and More London - a large pedestrianised area across the River Thames, with the attraction of a dash across Tower Bridge or the Millennium Bridge. Running across these famous bridges might not involve much navigation, but would certainly be memorable.

Oliver O'Brien (SLOW/JOK)

Organiser's Comments

After over a year from event conception, it was thrilling to see the early starters set off into the city in the Saturday morning sunshine, and it was even better to hear the many positive comments on their return. My first ever visit to the Barbican made me want to stage some sort of race there, but I wondered whether it would be possible for it to be suitably mapped. My first view of the map many months ago showed that Ollie had indeed managed to map it, and the rest of the City, in considerable detail, and confirmed that this race was going to be particularly special.

Huge credit must go to the fantastic work of Ollie, not just in producing a superb map (with seemingly endless iterations) and excellent planning, but also for a large amount of organising which made the role much easier for both Vince and myself. Ollie and I both had a fairly clear vision of how we would like to see the event turn out, and I can certainly say that my expectations were met, if not exceeded. The number of competitors, and their appearance from around Europe, was particularly pleasing (as were the comments received) - and I hope that the event can one day be as much a fixture on the international orienteering calendar as Venice is.

Further thanks must go to the large number of SLOW members who turned out to help. Having already hosted two large events in the space of a few weeks, there was slight concern that we were asking a lot for them to offer yet more of their time to the club, but the response was fantastic and they all contributed greatly to the event's success.

I'm looking forward to seeing everyone return for a similar race in 2009, hopefully this time as a fellow competitor!

Brooner (SLOW/TNS)

Controller's Comments

Well that seemed to go OK! Great Event Arena, great map, great courses, great weather, great scenery, 400 people having a great day out.

Let me start with a couple of apologies. There should have been loose control descriptions, and indeed there were loose control descriptions as many of you spotted just before the first start. Unfortunately at a late stage of planning all the controls were renumbered to match the available control units, but the loose control descriptions were generated from the version before the renumbering. The other main confusion was the thicket between St Paul’s Cathedral and control 151. The map showed this as fight, and people looking at the map were quite correct to decide they could try to run through it. The final details asked people to avoid doing this, and many people ran around the thicket, losing a few seconds.

At the sharp end of each course we had top-class athletes running extremely fast and taking things very seriously. Elsewhere we had first-timers who found that just getting round was a significant achievement. Trying to balance the requirements of this range of people is quite difficult. City races like this are never going to be absolutely fair. Most people probably got held up at some stage trying to cross a road, even though we avoided the busiest areas where possible. The level of building activity in the City is truly amazing. You probably also met at least one set of road works, construction work, mobile crane or convoy of concrete mixers (there were six or seven lined up by the NatWest Tower when I was checking controls). The only completely blocked route I heard of was a narrow alleyway heading north into Leadenhall Market (control 141). Apologies to anyone who went for this route choice and then had to double back. We broke a lot of circles and lines on the overprint, but still ended up missing one or two places. The worst case was probably the straight line between 1 and 2 on courses 3 and 5 which obscured a gate on a possible route choice.

But all these were standard problems when compared with what people soon found out to be the sting in the tail: the Barbican. I particularly liked the comment from someone who didn’t know what the Barbican was before the race and was expecting some sort of shopping centre. The main problem was of course trying to work out what level was what. Most people will now have realised that all the controls we used in the Barbican were on the same level, although earlier versions of the courses did use other levels. At one point we had an interesting debate about a possible control site on a wall corner which turned out to be underneath the mapped walkway. Ollie’s original version of the map used a special symbol, a thick brown line rather than a thick black line, to represent an uncrossable wall that you could run underneath. I personally felt this was a good solution and was happy with it, but Ollie decided to revert to the ISSOM standard. The problem then was in trying to show enough small black dots to make it obvious that it was allowed to run underneath the bridges. The original map also used a circle with a cross through it to show staircases. This had the advantage of being a better geographical representation, but it proved a little difficult to pick out. I was going to suggest making them bigger and changing them to be purple, but by then Ollie had drawn in individual flights of steps. Many of you are now aware that the innocuous line of steps leading out of the Barbican in the north east corner near 128 is in fact a tortuous spiral, complete with a lift for those who can’t face the climb. There are various routes through the Barbican Centre itself which we didn’t want people to try. This was mainly solved by removing some tunnels from the map and using olive green to show other bits as out of bounds. The other major map change was the removal of a lot of the pavement edges from the smaller roads and alleyways. These simply made it harder to read the map, and I don’t think anybody was worried by the remaining thin black lines that end in the middle of the road in some places.

With only five courses and the real threat of vandalism I was always keen to minimise the number of controls. We ended up with only 33, of which 28 were on course 1. This turned out to be helpful on the morning since putting out even this number was quite a slow process. We had long email and car park discussions about possible modifications to courses and control sites, and what eventually emerged seemed to be very well received. I didn’t get too worried about the same leg run in different directions, or common sequences of legs between courses, or the many potential dog-leg options. Maybe these issues really are less important in this type of area as opposed to more traditional wooded areas. The original Women’s Super Vets course looked a little long so we dropped it in length (even before the Nopesport discussion on the subject). The original Junior course spent a lot more time in the Barbican which I suggested was probably a little too much for them.

So now you know how good an area the City of London really is. SLOW should be congratulated for putting on the event. In particular, the Planner and Organiser, Ollie and Brooner were the ones who had the vision and enthusiasm to make it happen and deserve the most praise. I certainly reckon it should become an annual must-run event in the British Orienteering calendar.

Simon Errington (HH)