Night climbing in Cambridge

Night climbing is a term used, principally at the Oxford and Cambridge universities in England, to describe the sport of climbing up the walls of colleges and public buildings, and exploring the rooftops. This activity is frowned on by college authorities, so it is mainly done under cover of darkness, to avoid detection.

The sport is a subset of buildering, or urban climbing, and is distinguished by the fact that it is usually carried out nocturnally by university students.

The original term for this activity was "roof climbing". The alternative term "night climbing" was introduced in the late 1930s, and has become the standard term.

In 1895, the alpinist Geoffrey Winthrop Young started to climb the roofs of Cambridge University. Students had been scrambling up the university buildings for years, but Young was the first to document this activity. He wrote and published a night climbing guide to Trinity College.

In 1905, while a master at Eton College, Young produced his second book, a small volume on buildering, entitled "Wall and Roof Climbing". This was a very erudite work, containing a rich variety of quotations from writers of many different periods and cultures.

In 1921, inspired by Young's guide to Trinity, a group of undergraduates, including Hartley, Grag and Darlington, published a night climbing guide to St John's College.

In 1930, John Hurst wrote the second edition of the guide to Trinity.

In 1937, a more comprehensive, though still light-hearted, account of Cambridge undergraduate night climbing appeared in popular print, written by Noël Howard Symington, under the pseudonym "Whipplesnaith".

Night climbing remained popular in Cambridge after World War II. In 1960, Richard Williams wrote the third edition of the Trinity guide. In 1970, a book entitled "Night Climbing in Cambridge" was published under the pseudonym "Hederatus". Night climbing also featured prominently in a book by F A Reeve, entitled "Varsity Rags and Hoaxes", published in 1977, and in the detective novel “The Bad Quarto” by Jill Paton Walsh, published in 2007.

In recent years, a number of books on night climbing in Cambridge have been published by Oleander Press, of Cambridge, as follows:

In 2007, Corpus Christi alumnus Ivo Stourton published the novel The Night Climbers which is based on a group of students who engage in the practice.

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