The History of Climbing Buildings, Otherwise Known as Buildering

General disgust seems to follow those who scale skyscrapers in big cities lately. No, we're not talking about those who want to throw a brick at Spiderman startling the employee working on the 57^th floor of a high-rise in New York City. We're not even talking about a person who decides to not wear Spiderman tights or even take any climbing equipment with him or her. We're talking the ones who see a tall building, want to climb it because it's there (or maybe for more meaningful reasons)--yet don't bother to use any type of climbing equipment other than their arms and legs. These people managed to create a term for this activity that may be an official name now, but the sport itself has been around since before the turn of the 20^th century when the Victorian Era adherents probably looked at it with more disgust than people today do.

Once again, we can give credit to the British for starting something (I have a record going on citing how much they've given to us benighted Americans)--because that's exactly where the concept of what's called "buildering" started. It was at Cambridge where it supposedly started, though nobody has ever known for sure. The whole thing was really meant as a highly unserious endeavor, perhaps with a typical British tongue-in-cheek stance on lampooning various odd careers. Even the famous British mountaineer Geoffrey Winthrop Young, who was a student at Cambridge smack dab during the Victorian Era, managed to write a tongue-in-cheek book about climbing buildings called "The Roof-Climber's Guide to Trinity."

A lot of buildering experts today would probably scoff at the satirical frame of mind building climbers had back in Victorian Era Britain. They have to put it all in a frame of mind, though, considering the times. One can only imagine the scorn Young and other Cambridge alumnae who started climbing buildings around England would have received had they told a newspaper reporter that this was a super serious sport that would become a popular pastime with a certain few in future decades...as well as cross the pond to America where the world's largest skyscrapers were starting to be constructed.