Buildering actually started in the 1890s, and Cambridge (and Oxford to some extent) developed a sophisticated subculture that flourished in the 1920s and 30s. After Geoffrey Winthrop Young, the noted English writer and mountaineer, published The Roof Climbers Guide to Trinity in 1899, a succession of Cambridge buildering references followed: Wall and Roof Climbing (1905), Climbing in Cambridge: An essay and some incidents (1921), articles in the Alpine Sports in Cambridge (1924) and A Novel Climb in Cambridge (1926).

The holy grail of buildering references is the highly influential and much revered The Night Climbers of Cambridge, published in 1937 under the pseudonym 'Whipplesnaith,' which detailed, along with diagrams and photographs, the classic routes on campus: King's College, St John's College and The Senate Leap. [Whipplesnaith was the pseudonym for Noel H. Symington, a recent graduate of the University. He worked with as many as 15 other students to create this incredible record in the autumn of 1936. Many climbed, some were camera-men, all helped silently lug the apparatus around in the dead of night.]

Here is a terrific description we copied from another copy on the internet:

''Five years after successfully launching the original in the Night Climbing series, The Roof-Climbers Guide to Trinity, on an unsuspecting world in 1900, Geoffrey Winthrop-Young penned an astonishingly erudite parody of the literature guides of the time. With extensive stegophilic references and quotations drawn from the literature of the the last two thousand years and more, he nearly manages to prove that Catullus and Aristophanes, Shakespeare and Longfellow - amongst very many others - were avid enthusiasts and exponents of roof climbing.''