Outdoors versus indoors? Angling ponds, climbing walls and changing expectations of environmental leisure

Abstract

This paper compares two types of purpose‐built recreational space – indoor climbing walls and outdoor fishing ponds – using participant observation and interviews with climbers and anglers in England. We show how these notionally ‘indoor’ and ‘outdoor’ spaces have strong similarities in terms of how they are used and perceived. We draw on literature about consumption and technology to demonstrate changing expectations and social norms about using each space. We also compare walls and ponds with supermarkets to highlight how this consumerist interpretation is used in a moral ordering of leisure behaviour. We therefore take a very different approach from research that emphasises sensation, risk and embodiment in outdoor leisure and adventure tourism. Instead, we show how such spaces reflect modernist domestication and control, problematising the indoor/outdoor dualism and emphasising the multiple experiences of environmental leisure.