The dramatic images of the bespectacled PhD student who evaded security at the Shard and shimmied up the tallest building in Europe have thrown a spotlight on urban exploration.
The London Consolidation Crew, which was behind the Shard stunt, is not alone in breaking the law to climb tall buildings after dark. The Night Climbers of Cambridge were students who scaled university buildings back in the 1930s; there is also the "buildering" tradition of climbing buildings without permission and the "cave clan" of Australia who first explored drains in the 1980s.
But the illicit, mostly nocturnal exploration of sewers, tunnels, derelict buildings and tower cranes – exploring the neglected vertical dimensions of the city – has taken off with the sharing of photographs online among an Anglo-American "UrbEx" community, with other devotees in Belgium, France and Spain.
Like every online subculture, urban explorers can be a competitive bunch, torn between finding secret places to explore and boasting about them. Some claim they are libertarian historians, benignly documenting ruins and unpeeling layers of the city while sticking two fingers up to a risk-averse society controlled by CCTV.
UrbEx has spawned its own secret vocabulary of cracking (entering a new location), Noobs (new explorers) and Drainers (sewer fans) and a long list of cracked locations, including the Forth bridge, Battersea power station, a nuclear bunker on MoD land in Wiltshire and the defunct underground station at Aldwych.
A number of the Aldwych explorers were caught and threatened with Asbos. While the Shard scalers got away with it, the news has brought a backlash. A few online critics have questioned the authenticity of the images; other explorers are simply dismayed at the publicity.
Bradley L Garrett is a 31-year-old American who recently completed a fascinating PhD on urban exploration at Royal Holloway, University of London. Garrett became part of the London Consolidation Crew and put photos of his Shard climb in his thesis before publishing them online.
Rival explorers have called him a "pretentious prat" and fear that urban exploration will be ruined by publicity – commodified by the mainstream (the fate of every subculture from surfing to parkour) and shut down by more vigilant security operations. "Brad's thesis is a bit of a sore topic among some of the community," says one explorer. "They feel that it brings too much attention."
Garret admits in his PhD that it became a "completely debilitating" adrenaline addiction but he insists that urban exploring is more than a passing fad. "The amount of research and effort required to access many of these places rivals the great explorations of the 20th century," he says.
