FREE runners have been stunning shoppers by turning Blackburn town centre into an urban assault course.

Karl Barker, 21, from Highercroft, and Callum Harris, 19, from Darwen, said they have ‘turned their lives around’ by practising Parkour, a sport in which they run, flip and slide off city buildings and furniture.

The self-confessed ‘former bad lads’ have been practising for about six years, and said it had helped them focus on something positive and stay out of trouble. The pair can often be spotted in Church Street at about midday.

Sometimes described as ‘like skateboarding without the skateboards’, Parkour was founded in France in the 1980s by a group young men, although it was not until 1998 that the term, deriving from the French word Parcours meaning ‘route’ or ‘course’, was introduced.

It is a non-competitive physical discipline to move freely over and through any terrain using only the abilities of the body.