A Rooftop You Have to Telephone For

The four questions

The same four questions, asked of every entry

Whose ground it is	A building owner with tenants below, insurance above and no obligation whatever to let anybody up. Everything about this arrangement is a favour and it helps to hold that in mind.
How far in you get	The marked part of the deck, with somebody, for as long as they can spare. Not the plant, not the parapet, not alone, and not with a tripod unless it was agreed on the telephone.
What it costs to be there	Nothing, usually. Occasionally a small donation to something the building supports, and the person will tell you.
What going wrong looks like	Turning up without calling. There is no arrangement to fall back on and the answer at the desk will be no, correctly.

The mechanism is one telephone call

Not a form, not an email, not a booking page. A call, in working hours, to a person who is doing three other things.

This is the defining feature of the band and it catches out anybody used to booking everything on a screen. There is no system here. There is somebody's calendar and their sense of whether today is a day for it.

Call at least a week ahead, and call again the day before. The second call is not nagging. It is the one that catches the thing that changed.

What to say

Keep it to four sentences and put the useful ones first.

1. Who you are, in six words.
2. What you are asking for, precisely: the deck, twenty minutes, one afternoon next week.
3. Why, if there is a why. Curiosity is a perfectly good answer and it is better than a made up one.
4. That you will fit around them.

What not to say: anything that implies you are owed it, anything that mentions how far you have come, and anything that turns a favour into a transaction.

When the answer is no

It will be, sometimes, and the answer to that is to accept it in one sentence and thank them.

There is a version of the visitor who hears no and starts negotiating, and that person is the reason arrangements like this quietly stop existing. Every rooftop in this city that used to be reachable and now is not was closed by somebody who pushed.

If you are told to call back in a month, call back in a month. That is not a brush off, it is a schedule.

What you actually get

Twenty minutes, usually with somebody standing nearby who has other things to do, and a view that no publicly reachable ground in this city offers.

You also get the thing that makes the whole band worth the trouble: you are somewhere as a guest rather than as a member of the public, and the difference in how it feels is larger than the difference in what you can see.

Practical

• No facilities of any kind up there. Go before you go up.
• Wind on a deck is two categories stronger than wind at street level.
• A hand rail is not a parapet and the difference matters.
• If a tripod was not agreed, leave it in the car.