“IT FELT LIKE A POSITIVE GANG – EVERYONE WAS THERE TO BETTER THEMSELVES”
The no-nonsense equipment at Brixton Street Gym might lack the bells and whistles of your high-street leisure centre, but founder Terroll Lewis knows better than most that you don’t need much to get in shape. Between 2008 and 2009, Lewis served time in Belmarsh Prison, for involvement in a gun murder for which he was eventually cleared. While he was locked up, his ‘gym’ consisted of a bed, a bin and a toilet seat.
“I first started doing calisthenics as something to do,” he says. “That was my meditation – my time away from time.”
Before then, there was no room for exercise – only robbery and drug dealing as ‘Boost’, a high-ranking member of Brixton’s notorious OC street gang. When he was a young boy – looking up at the cash-flaunting older lads who loitered around the Myatts Field estate where he lived with his grandparents – OC stood for ‘Organised Crime’. Later, it
