Buildering
Comments(0) I first read about climbing on buildings in Phil Ashby’s Unscathed where he writes about his participation in the long-standing Cambridge tradition of nightclimbing (or buildering as Wikipedia tells me). His stories are a funny as hell and the book is well worth reading just on that basis, but I remember thinking Cambridge seemed an odd place for such a sport to develop. On second thought it really isn’t as there’s hardly anything else in the neighbourhood to keep rock climbers occupied.
My thoughts returned to this phenomenon via Gadling via Slate articles on odd travel guides among which you can find Night Climbers of Cambridge by Whipplesnaith. Further browsing got me to InsectNation where you can read not one but two of these historic guides on classic building routes on Cambridge. As well as a few newspaper articles. All scanned and OCRed for your convenience. A fabulous resource… if I’m ever in Cambridge ;)
The shopkeepers of Market Square were the first to learn of the most famous climb in Cambridge history. Opening their stalls one day in 1965, they saw a banner strung between two of the spires of King’s College chapel that read “Peace in Vietnamâ€. Of the four who put it there, one would become a Labour MP, another a professor of law. The other two would soon be dead.
Sunday Times feature, June 2007
But buildering is not limited to Cambridge university. Buildering.net and Freakclimbing.com bring us some interesting photos from around the world.
The south end of the roman era wall in Ljubljana has been a popular urban climbing spot for as long as I remember as is the synagogue in Maribor, Wikipedia has more on other locations.
