Oxford Brookes University Centre for Sport

Positive experience: Climbing wall/bouldering is decent but maybe a little small for its price

Fantastic experience: Only reason I am putting 5 star is because of eli the girl who is 10/10 service.

Fantastic experience: Rick climbing

Fantastic experience: Dropped the boy off for his first year. Really well organised as there were SO many people on the drop off weekend. Nice accommodation (parade green) reasonably close facilities for the students. So chuffed for him!

Negative experience: Ok

Positive experience: Muy lindo lugar

Positive experience: it's nice that the community can share mix and mingle with the student population at the Sports centre.

Positive experience: Climbing is great but website needs a total revamp, a convoluted mess that's hard to navigate

Fantastic experience: Wonderful staff who went above and beyond to give a welcoming, helpful and friendly experience while studying

Fantastic experience: Is everyone allowed to enter the university and learn about it?

Positive experience: Decent equipment and good amount of space for deadlifts and squats. The staff are friendly :)

Positive experience: Awesome facilities

Fantastic experience: Fabulous University lovely place to visit

Fantastic experience: Good uni

Positive experience: Very good but the trainer in climbing is not dealing well with my daughter

Fantastic experience: Um excelente local para treinamento. Com uma equipe cordial e com um preço justo tem todos os equipamentos necessários para um bom desenvolvimento físico. Para além de várias quadras de esportes coletivos, tem uma linda vista no por do sol. A parte de musculação é um pouco cheia e apesar de ter todos os aparelhos necessários as quantidades poderiam ser um pouco maiores, mas pelo preço está ótimo.

Fantastic experience: Good

Positive experience: Some good climbing especially since the expansion but my god is the customer service sometimes appalling. I'm a pay as you go customer as I'm only here during term time and don't manage to get down every week, and so booked a session in the day. Turned up with 25 minutes left in the slot due to a flat tire (not ideal). After trying to check in the woman at the desk said that I wouldn't be able to climb under my original booking and needed to spend another £10 (hefty especially for a student centre) and my booking for the time which I would be climbing in anyway would be nullified. Reluctantly I spent it and walked into a basically empty climbing centre. I have never met someone who seemed so unapologetic and rude about my situation and has really put me off coming again. Hoping Cowley gets a bouldering centre soon

Fantastic experience: A really wonderful gem and bouldering place!

Fantastic experience: Very convenient that it has a full gym and bouldering/climbing gym too! All under one roof! There are some great facilities, everything you need for a good, full work out.

Positive experience: The climbing is good and fun, but fairly small, there’s cheaper climbing in London with way more walls. Good cheap drinks at the bar. The main negative is the app, a terrible terrible app! To book anything you need an account, but you can’t make a password for the account on the app, you have to follow all these links and go back and forth between the app, emails and your browser to be able to set it up, so tedious!

Negative experience: Management is poor and front desk staff often unreasonable (though one gets the sense that management is running a pretty draconian regime...). Online registration and booking is a mess. It must be said though that the quality of the climbing gym is far better following recent improvements and the quality of route setting is generally good. However, they only reset the routes every two months, about half as often as they should.

Fantastic experience: Amazing place for a kick around

Fantastic experience: Great gym. I go bouldering here regularly. Would recommend

Fantastic experience: Very good activity centre, no swimming pool otherwise everything's here.

Fantastic experience: I visit the place consistently for climbing. Very fun. Very good.

Positive experience: Great little climbing experience for kids.

Fantastic experience: Fabulously studentesque climbing boutique accompanied by an amazingly study rich atmosphere from the in-house eager scholars. Roped climbing, 3 x autobelays, bouldering and finger boards. Changing rooms with lockers, (bring your own padlock as usual). Easy parking for motorcycles and pushbikes. Recommended!

Positive experience: Friendly staff. Facilities are basic.

Fantastic experience: Good place for a soccer game. We're there every Wednesday.

Positive experience: Serviceable gym from my perspective. Older equipment with some gaps but sufficient in terms of squat racks, deadlift platforms, and Olympic bars/plates. Never super crowded. Friendly staff. Clientele mind their business and don't do anything super invasive or weird.

Fantastic experience: A must have for every Brookes member

Fantastic experience: Great. Climbing, gym, fields.

Positive experience: AstroTurf pitches and 4-5 pitch good place to play teams.

Fantastic experience: I joined the adult novice climbing course and thus have used the climbing and bouldering walls. The staff if super friendly. The instructor and his assistant are great people and knowledgeable. The infrastructure is great. There are four different halls for both indoor climbing and bouldering. The walls are big and there is enough room for everyone. It tends to be a bit crowded late evenings. Edit 30/07/2023: they expanded the bouldering area. I tried the new walls twice so farm they are just amazing, providing lots of different choices for all levels.

Negative experience: Wrong post code

Negative experience: Parking limited and quite expensive after 2 hours free. Lighting very poor in the hall for badminton

Fantastic experience: Greath university

Negative experience: Failed my exam

Positive experience: Climbing is decent for small gym but has scammy booking policy. Covid is over lads you're not fooling anyone.

Negative experience: Incredibly unprofessional staff, as I was heading into the climbing wall today, overheard a member of staff bullying another climber over a review he'd written on Google. I could believe what I was hearing and how someone could be so unprofessional and borderline aggressive to a customer. Will seriously rethink coming here again if this is how people are treated by staff.

Fantastic experience: I love the atmosphere, the final assignment beer, and the hallumi fries.

Fantastic experience: Been going to Brookes Climbing Wall for ages. Love the staff, love the climbers who go there. It's like the club I always wanted to go to. Great, challenging setting and exciting routes. Don't get caught up in grades, just know that it's generally hard, a bit like climbing outside, as it should be. Love the fact that if you climb well here, you can climb well anywhere.

Negative experience: God awful climbing centre that we all go to because there's no other option in Oxford. Half the space is taken up by a short top rope wall that no one ever uses because the routes are so dull. Bouldering routes are wildly innacurate with grading and get updated about 5 times a year. Expect to pay £9 to get in and then find instructors using up entire areas for classes and blocking off your options for autobelay or lead. The routes are clearly set by people with no passion for climbing - they're so uninspired compared to other gyms and the grading is utterly all over the place. If you want a decent climb with modern facilities make the effort to go to the one in reading. With the money they take on a busy evening they could easily fix these issues, but it's been like this for years. Slightly better than going to your nearby park and going up and down the monkey bars...

Positive experience: Good place to climb and train. Not too social though like other gyms.. everyone is so focussed. Probably it's Oxford..that's why

Negative experience: Was really surprised that it's not included in tuition. It's very crammed in there. Dangerously crammed. Someone is seriously going to get hurt here one day. There's no safety arms on the squat racks upstairs and the ones downstairs fit loosely onto the cage. There's a box jumping station downstairs where there is no room for aerobic movements whatsoever. Furthermore, many of the members have terrible form and are at high risk of injury. Overall gym etiquette/culture is not good. There is no standard of re-racking weights in an organized fashion and putting equipment back where it belongs. This is the job of gym staff to be periodically keeping the place tidy throughout the day but they don't. Their cleaning standards are very poor. The gym wipe dispensers are always empty and there is always piles of dirt underneath all of the equipment. Makes sense when you see the cheap little vacuum they use to clean. And it smells awful in there. Staff can certainly be friendlier. I've found them to be minimally helpful. Just not the kind of customer service I'd expect at this price point. Speaking of price, you can't use the basketball courts and you need to bring your own weight belts. The music is SO LOUD and they play sad music. Also kind of random but there is very little mirror real estate.

Negative experience: Gym and bouldering is wildly under equipped for the price, bars are old, not enough plates, layout is poor. Bouldering wall is poor, in desperate need of an upgrade, staff are rude and unhelpful. Go to buzz gym or iffley road sports centre, boulder in another city.

Fantastic experience: Superb facility .. joined last week and already feel at home.. and membership is so cheap ! Great little bar too

Fantastic experience: A great University made of greatest people, The structure, way of teaching, cleaniness, on site shops and services are brialaint combination of Brookes University. The students should be lucky and the lecturers should be honoured i believe.

Fantastic experience: Really great facilities.

Positive experience: Savir-

Fantastic experience: Girl at the reception on Saturday with curly brown hair super friendly and helpful, great atmosphere in the sportshall also

Positive experience: Weightlifting equipment needs an upgrade... Barbells are very smooth, didn't feel so safe. The deadlifts platforms are nice and I reckon the benches are fine for taller people.

Positive experience: Decent gym with swimming pool and other sports activities.

Fantastic experience: Fantastic climbing wall.

Fantastic experience: very nice ✌

Fantastic experience: Nice place

Negative experience: Nice clean and well maintained plus nice cafe

Positive experience: It's OK foods cheap enough astro pitch is OK Good if your a student

Fantastic experience: Nice quiet place to train. Other members just keep themselves to themself with minimal social interaction. Good place to achieve goals. I found the atmosphere motivation. Local Community member. Nice one Brookes

Positive experience: A day pass in the Gym is around £8

Fantastic experience: All your sport activities is available

Positive experience: Very covid safe mask encouraged on campus

Positive experience: Great climbing wall and good fun classes

Negative experience: Gym music is ridiculously loud and I can't hear my own music! We do not want to year stupid music when we bring our own for the purpose of motivation. Sort it out

Positive experience: Come and play outdoor football for 1 hour on Wednesday nights if bookings are available.

Fantastic experience: Oxford Brookes sports centre one of the best in Oxford city.

Fantastic experience: Play here once in the week in the evenings. Absolutely Fantastic.

Fantastic experience: Have been going here for rock climbing for many years and have seen the facility grow immensely. Very professional friendly staff. Very clean and well maintained.

Negative experience: Rundown, dirty, Web information not updated. Staff uninterested .

Positive experience: Good spacious gym with all the equipment that you need. Upstairs for cardio and downstairs for the weightroom. The gym also has a great climbing wall and food outlet. It can get busy but not too bad.

Negative experience: For the climbing wall: needs serious modernising. As a regular there are several key ways that the wall can be improved as it is really below average in its current form when compared to what you get with more modern climbing gyms. - Route setting every 8 weeks is just not enough considering how small the gym is. It's gets very boring very quickly for all levels as I'm sure a quick survey would reveal. This I consider to be the main massive drawback and doesnt encourage people to go regularly. - There needs to be a systems board or splatter board installed on the back wall in the main room. Virtually all new climbing centres have these and are a must for intermediate and above climbers. - Generally add a few more routes per wall. I.e. hold density is on the low side. Again considering the size of the gym it would really help the problem with running out of interesting climbing to do for regulars as well as relieving pressure off of the need to get routesetters in. - Main bouldering room gets extremely hot and could do with better air cooling and circulation. Climbing is a sport that is friction dependent. Nobody wants to climb in a sweaty sauna/steam room. At least bring back the big fans. Please please please consider these points, they would not cost very much in the grand scheme of things!!

Fantastic experience: Great climbing wall

Positive experience: In terms of rock climbing, they have a very small rock climbing centre, with only four levels that don't match any standard (green-blue-red-black). They could do with an expansion, especially given how packed it gets. Having said this, one can't really complain, as this is the only rock climbing centre in all of Oxford...

Fantastic experience: Fantastic climbing center and staff from the big bosses to the new starters

Negative experience: They never answer the phone...

Positive experience: Its a small place that has a gym for working out and another big gym for sports. What I like the most is the rock climbing room. The gym is okay and has most of the stuff you would need for a proper workout however timing is key as it can get super busy sometimes.

Negative experience: Very bad customer service, my membership needed about 2 weeks of sorting out with the receptionists and the membership staff and it is still broken to this day. It would be easier if you found another sports centre to exercise in.

Fantastic experience: Great value gym membership

Positive experience: I come to the climbing wall here quite often. There are a variety of walls, as well as an autobelay system to allow you to climb long routes on your own. There is a traverse wall as well as many bouldering walls. All the routes get changed a few times a year

Fantastic experience: Interesting university

Fantastic experience: Amazing

Negative experience: Music in communual area way too loud.

Fantastic experience: Super

Negative experience: Prices and Times for activities do not match what is shown online. Check by phone first,and call on a weekday.

Fantastic experience: Nice, well maintained fields on a modern campus

Positive experience: Nice place with lots of good facilities. Can be very busy at start of uni term. Climbing wall and gym are popular. Bar and food at good prices.

Negative experience: I took someone new to climbing here only to find that they don't hire out harnesses. They hire shoes but not harnesses. Very weird. So we had to do bouldering and there are probably 1 or 2 problems that a new climber could actually attempt. So I'd say this place is not beginner friendly at all. We left very soon after we arrived. So if you're bringing someone new make sure to have a spare harness for them and don't rely on the bouldering. Or go somewhere else.

Negative experience: OK gym - but terrible loud tasteless music

Positive experience: Nice place

Negative experience: I was really looking forward to a climb. But this centre is almost impossible to find no where to park and ask anyone. No signage giving you a hint to where it is hidden guessing they only want to locals and students to know where it is!

Positive experience: It's a lot cheaper than other local gyms but does get very busy in term time. The online booking system is slow and clunky but generally ok, it's definitely needed as I can't remember them ever answering the phone despite trying to call numerous times.

Fantastic experience: A great sports facility including football and hockey grounds, Gyms, climbing wall, Saunas (dry and steam both), offers yoga classes as well.

Positive experience: Nice place

Positive experience: I have been using the gym and climbing facilities regularly for the last 3 months, and feel it would be worth leaving an honest unbiased review about them. The climbing gym is slightly above your average school/university facilty, and can accomodate any skill level. It's not huge, but not small either. The routes are re-set every 6 weeks or so which is perfect in my opinion. There are very few top ropes left set up (often none at all), most routes are lead, and there are about 3 or 4 auto belays (for me this is great as I prefer leading, but doesn't suit everyone). Regardless of your experience, it's worth going. The main gym is well equipped, having a proper free-weight/powerlifting area downstairs, and a CV/machine based room upstairs. It accomodates pretty much all styles of training, and you can even drop heavy barbells to your hearts content without anyone whining. A lot of the equipment is very tired and unmaintained, however. All the barbells and dumbbells are worn smooth and have no grip. Many of the machines don't operate smoothly due to wear and/or lack of maintenance. There is almost always one or more piece of equipment broken which takes several weeks to be repaired. It is frequently over crowded, surprisingly even at "off peak" times (presumably because off peak membership is heavily discounted). Also, I have personally never been to a gym where so many people sit around hogging the equipment while texting on their phones which is infuriating. I personally find the atmosphere unpleasant too. Overall, it could be a lot better if they invested some money into servicing and replacing some peices of equipment, and enforced rules about equipment hogging and phone usage.

Fantastic experience: I only used the climbing facilities and took a short climbing course. The beginners climbing course is brilliant with two varied and skilled instructors

Positive experience: Climbing route rating system too coarse and inconsistent.

Positive experience: Good value for money and lovely atmosphere. Shame about the lack of ropes to toprope. Route setting seemed inconsistent from route to route. Loved the slackline area on a sunny day.

Positive experience: Climbing gym lacks frequent route setting. Routes aren't set that well either.

Positive experience: This rating is just for the gym, which is OK. It has a good selection of machines, and free weights. It has barbells, but no safety equipment (e.g. power rack) , which would let people squat and bench press safely, without using a spotter. The downstairs Strength & Conditioning room has one, but that room is intimidating so I don't use it! When equipment breaks, it takes quite a while for it to be fixed. Many of the machine weights' numbers have peeled off, so it can be awkward to work out what weight you're lifting. The music is pretty bad, which wouldn't be a problem if it weren't so loud. I wear headphones, but the terrible music still leaks in. Most other people wear headphones, so it's obvious the music isn't really wanted; I guess the leadership doesn't care that much.