RISKING EVERYTHING
His driving need to climb the world’s highest buildings means he’s constantly putting his life in danger or facing the threat of arrest. But British daredevil free-climber George King says there’s no point trying to stop him
HE WAS nearing the 70th floor of Lotte World Tower in Seoul, more than halfway up the world’s sixth-tallest building. Wearing only shorts, shoes and a parachute on his back, George King was determined to climb right to the very top. The Korean skyscraper is comparable in shape to The Shard, the 310-metre London landmark that turned George’s passion into a precarious living when he made headline news after climbing it in 2019. But at 555 metres, the Lotte World Tower, which was finished in 2016, would be a much bigger test.
The British daredevil free climber spent six months planning his biggest stunt yet.
A key point in this plan was to make a clean getaway. After reaching the building’s summit, 123 floors above the streets of Seoul, he would jump, taking less than a minute to glide back down, as far from the tower as his canopy would take him.
He would then don a disguise (or at least a cap and some actual clothes) and jump on a plane back to London before anyone could identify him.
George (24) was sweating profusely as he climbed the tower’s west face early one Monday morning in June.
Following his every move was a drone camera, deployed by his sponsor, a UK vape brand that was paying him to attempt the dangerous climb.
He was making good progress, until, not far above the halfway point, he spotted two anxious faces a few floors above him and to his right.
A man and woman wearing hard hats and high-visibility vests were gripping the sides of a maintenance cradle as it and its crane emerged from a large hatch in the building.
Nobody had previously attempted to intercept George during a climb, for fear of causing him to fall.
“But I’ve learnt that South Korean culture is a different kettle of fish,” he tells me from Seoul, a few weeks later, while he waits for a judge to decide if he should go to jail for the second time.
“Here they want to do everything they can to eliminate the problem. And for them, getting in the way was the solution.”
At first, George thought he would be able to keep going, ascending beyond the cradle’s reach as he climbed one of the metal fins that run up the full height of the tower. But soon the platform began to move sideways towards and above him, blocking his route. He hooked a leg through an opening in the fin, bracing himself in a resting position while he considered his next move.
GEORGE is talking to me in early August, via Zoom. He’s staying in a friend’s flat a few kilometres west of the Lotte World Tower. He’s got his T-shirt back on (he always climbs topless, preferring to be unencumbered by sleeves or etiquette).
Youthful energy crackles between our screens as he whips his laptop out on the balcony to show me the view of far-off skyscrapers.
George, who is tall and broad-shouldered, is part of a rare but growing breed of daredevils operating on social media and the fringes of society. He’s a climber with little interest in rocks. Cities are his playground and a canvas for dangerous creativity.
He “surfs” on the roofs of speeding trains, swings from the highest cranes and leaps from wind turbines. He is perhaps closer in spirit to British street artist Banksy than Alex Honnold, the superstar American rock climber known for his ropeless ascents of towering cliffs. “The rule-breaking side of what I do is the reason I choose urban structures over natural ones,” George says. “It’s the idea that this is something that’s not meant to be done, that isn’t conventional or normal. It’s just so much more exciting.”
He’s no fool, either – although I’ll challenge him later to justify the impact of what he does on other people, including his family.
He is also effortlessly charming and manages to explain his fears and motivations with an unvarnished self-awareness and honesty I’ve rarely encountered in big risk-takers.
In many senses there’s nothing new in what he does. Alain Robert, “the French Spider-Man”, has been climbing tall buildings for more than 25 years and has been arrested more than 100 times.
Alain is a little dismissive of George and his contemporaries when I call him, describing towers such as The Shard and Lotte World Tower as “ladders” thanks to their generous exterior structures.
“What has changed is their images are better than mine because I had no GoPro or drones,” Alain says. “People were filming from the bottom, and that kind of angle is s**t.”
Social media platforms are full of these latter-day daredevils (George is known as Shardclimber on Instagram).
It doesn’t always end happily. Remi Lucidi, a 30-year-old Frenchman also known as “Remi Enigma” was found dead at the bottom of an apartment block in Hong Kong in July. He had not climbed the building but had blagged his way on to the roof, before somehow becoming stuck and falling.
George did not know Remi, but do deaths like his make him think twice?
“Not at all,” he says. “If I saw someone die doing what I do and that were to stop me, it would imply that I’d been naive beforehand. And I’m not. I always know there is a possibility that I could die, but I also believe that, with the right preparation and skill set, that probability can be drastically minimised. I hold that logic to my heart.”
HE SPENT 15 minutes negotiating with the workers in the maintenance cradle, telling them it would be safer to let him go on. “But they just screamed at me in Korean and broken English,” he says. “So I tried to move the cradle and squeeze past it, but it was too heavy and I struggled to keep my balance.”
Sweat still pouring off him as people
‘THE RULEBREAKING SIDE OF WHAT I DO IS THE REASON I CHOOSE URBAN STRUCTURES OVER NATURAL ONES’
in suits began to fill their offices, he set out to prepare his parachute. He was high enough to jump safely and still anxious to escape the authorities.
To clear the building’s walls, he would have to leap from a more stable footing, which meant climbing into the cradle itself.
At the 72nd floor, George was already at about the full height of The Shard. He says looking down does not induce what most people would recognise as terror.
“Normally I feel nothing, I’m so locked in,” he says. “I’m in a survival zone where sometimes the height invigorates me. That exposure to me is a drug.”
Spotting a hatch in the floor of the platform, George climbed up through it only for a high-rise tussle to break out. The two workers kept trying to restrain him as he reached for his little pilot chute, which base jumpers throw as they fall (when the air catches the pilot chute, it yanks the main canopy out of the backpack).
Soon the rope connecting the two chutes started to get tangled around the man’s legs. The woman began to cry.
“It was just getting really messy and dangerous,” George says.
He had run out of options and, adrenaline still coursing through his body, he gave up and headed into the building towards an uncertain fate.
LIFE for George King wasn’t supposed to be like this. He grew up near Oxford, the third son of Hilary, who works for her family property business, and Clive, a chartered surveyor. His brothers lead conventional lives but, for reasons he doesn’t understand, George arrived with different ideas.
“From a very young age I remember being curious about fear,” he says. “I wanted to understand it. So I’d climb trees and jump off them and try to work out what those butterflies in my stomach were. Because when I overcame them I’d feel this euphoria and then I’d want to understand and control that too.”
George did OK at his private school but his head was elsewhere. He dreamt of the stunts he wanted to pull off, adding them to a secret list during bouts of insomnia. Aged about 11, he snuck away during a Scout camp to scale an eightmetre climbing wall without ropes.
“It was the first time I felt, like, this thing – the purity of the moment,” he says. “I can remember it to this day.”
Climbing became George’s outlet for emotional exploration and rebellion. He climbed the family home in secret and got suspended for scaling his school. He started climbing cranes at 13.
At around the same time, he remembers spotting The Shard through a coach window on a school trip to London. It went straight to the top of his list.
Meanwhile, George was also diagnosed with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), which surprised nobody in the family.
Various studies have shown that a higher proportion of people with ADHD have a gene variant that changes the way dopamine is processed; they are more likely to take risks and try new things.
George was put on Ritalin, which improved his focus in class, but “robbed me of my character and creativity . . . I couldn’t think outside the box anymore. To me, if you have to give a child a drug for them to be normal in school, that’s a clear indication that this path is not for them.”
He also believes passionately that we live in a society – and a parenting culture – that is strangled by an overabundance of caution. “I’ve always felt that the absolute richness of life can only be found outside the comfort zone,” he says.
There have been other jobs, as a personal trainer and in fundraising, but when George turned 18 he carried out his first recce of The Shard. It is one of the few significant buildings that Alain Robert has not climbed (he was threatened with serious jail time when it emerged he was considering an attempt).
George knew that if he could pull it off, it would not only mark the fulfilment of a dream, but potentially launch an unlikely new career.
Getting access would be a major challenge, and he spent a year planning his stunt. He staked out the building, wearing different outfits each time, to learn how security teams operated. He pretended to be drunk and slept on a bench near the train station at the base of the tower, keeping one eye open to monitor one potential access point.
Early one morning in July 2019, George, who was 19, scaled the roof of the adjacent station and sprinted to the tower. It took 45 minutes to reach the top. The shirtless Shard climber was going viral by the time he reached the summit, where he expected police to tackle and
‘I’VE ALWAYS FELT THAT THE ABSOLUTE RICHNESS OF LIFE CAN ONLY BE FOUND OUTSIDE THE COMFORT ZONE’
arrest him. “Instead they shook my hand, had a chat and 30 minutes later I was walking around London Bridge station without any money, phone or T-shirt, just trying to absorb what had happened.”
His mother later said she was numb on hearing what George had done but was very used to learning about such stunts after the fact. George doesn’t enjoy scaring his family. “But they understand this is something I’ll always be doing,” he says. “They know there’s no point trying to stop me.”
IT WAS only when he got back to his own phone and a whirlwind of media requests that George started to realise how far word of his stunt had travelled. Alain Robert’s agent got in touch and briefly worked for him, although George now represents himself – he prefers having the control.
Riot Labs, the vape brand, began sponsoring him with an undisclosed salary that frees him up to plan his stunts and pay for fines and legal fees.
Thinking he had got away with his Shard climb, George quit his job as a personal trainer and revelled in his notoriety. He was out most nights and fielding book and film offers by day.
But in October 2019 he received a sixmonth prison sentence for breaching an injunction that had been put in place a year earlier to stop such climbs. By then, he says, “I was going off the rails because I felt like I no longer had something to chase. Prison became a new challenge and, in a weird way, I was actually quite happy with it.”
Three months, as it turned out, in HM Prison Pentonville was no joke, but George says he made the right alliances and got credit for being “the Shard guy”.
He also went back to writing his list.
Covid reined him in but in July last year he climbed 112 metres to the top of Europe’s tallest rollercoaster and parachuted back down. It was his first “urban freebase”.
“When I get to the top of something, I have always felt like I wanted to jump – to fly,” he says. “This was the first taste of it and it felt like the true definition of freedom.”
George accepts that he can’t justify adding strain to under-resourced police forces or prisons. He often works at night with the intention of not being noticed at all.
In Berlin last October, nobody spotted him climbing the city’s tallest high-rise, or his parachute jump onto the roof of a neighbouring shopping mall, from which he escaped.
Whether he gets caught or not, he says people seem only to find vicarious joy in what he does.
“Ultimately I think there’s a bit of me in everyone,” he says.
The Lotte World Tower was going to be a new summit for George’s skills and dreams: a base jump from one of the world’s tallest skyscrapers. After he surrendered in the maintenance cradle, he was handcuffed and marched to a police cell. He was released after two nights with a block on his passport.
At the time of writing, he and his lawyer, who specialises in representing foreigners, are waiting to hear whether he can pay a fine rather than go to prison.
In the meantime, George is back tweaking his list, which is naturally top secret. He wants to find another climbable super-tall skyscraper that he can base-jump off and is prepared to do jail time again as a consequence.
He’s also making the most of being an early twenty-something in a big city – and having a great story to tell. The climb was big news in South Korea, and George admits he has enjoyed dining out on it.
“No one recognises my face but they recognise the stunt,” he says.
But he says the ego boost and the money are not what drive him. Nor does he see himself as part of a daredevil community.
“The big climbs I do are a performance, for sure, but most of the time I’m climbing on my own, often in the dark and without cameras,” he says. “And then it’s about the experience for me, and this dream that I’ve always had.”