A RESIDENT spoke of her shock after capturing this photo of two teenagers running on a rooftop near Brighton Station.

Joanne Jameson saw two people on the roof of the Sussex Masonic Centre in Queen’s Road yesterday evening and managed to snap a picture of them.

The 47-year-old, of Elm Drive, Brighton, said: “I heard this bang, like something crashing into the building, and saw them on the roof.

“It must be so dangerous, and I couldn’t believe they were doing it.”

Jack Rice, 18, who was spotted doing an impressive flip across the roof, has been doing parkour for three years and went up on the roof with a friend to film and take photographs.

He said: “My friends and I started after seeing videos on YouTube and we’ve really got into it. We’ll go anywhere high up, really.”

Jack added that the public image of parkour was wrong.

He said: “We want to let people know that we aren’t doing any damage or making a mess, we’re just filming and taking photos.”

Jack moved to Brighton from Northern Ireland and said there is a good community of free runners here.

He said: “The community in Ireland isn’t the best but when I moved here I found a Facebook group of people who were into it with hundreds of members, and it’s very lively.”

The Urban Playground, a parkour performance group based in Brighton, are one of the UK’s leading parkour groups.

Lead coach Alister O’Loughlin said: “Brighton has one of the healthiest parkour scenes in the UK, and people practise all of the various disciplines – parkour, free-running and more.”

However, he warned of the risks associated with the sport, saying: “Professional groups like us and others have trained for years and we know what we are doing.

“But people see the flips and jumps and want to do that too.

“You have to do a thousand tiny jumps before you can do a big one.”

Highs and lows of free running

PARKOUR involves people running across and over obstacles, while free running mixes speed with gymnastic feats such as flips and spins.

It is thought to have been developed in Paris in the 1980s, but recently the rise of social media has increased its popularity among young people.

In July 2014 a video was posted to the website YouTube showing a group of boys scaling a crane and hanging one handed from its arm.

Jake Deakin said he wanted “to celebrate the end of exams by watching a summer sunrise from a crane”, and the group are shown standing on the crane’s arm as day breaks.

One of the boys grins into the camera, then lowers himself down and hangs one handed over a busy road near Brighton station.

Daredevil climbers were spotted performing handstands on the Queen’s Park arches in 2013, and a group of boys aged from 14 to 24 were slammed by East Sussex Fire and Rescue service for their “irresponsible and reckless” videos filmed on top of rooftops and cranes across Brighton and Hove.

And in 2011 a man was seriously injured after falling 30 feet through the roof of a building while practising parkour in Circus Street, Brighton.

He and some friends were on the roof of the former municipal market when he fell through a thin asbestos roof