British man arrested during attempt to climb 123-storey skyscraper in South Korea

Man earlier held for scaling Shard building in London in 2019

File: Free-solo climber George King-Thompson walks along the top of the Stratosphere Tower building, a 36-storey residential tower block in Stratford, east London (PA Wire)

A British man was taken into custody after he attempted to scale the world’s fifth tallest building without harness on Monday.

The man, identified by the Chosun Ilbo newspaper as George King-Thompson, managed to climb half-way up the building to the 73rd floor before South Korean authorities forced him to abandon his attempt to reach the top of 123-storey Lotte World Tower in Seoul.

Wearing a pair of shorts, the 24-year-old man made his way up the landmark skyscraper for more than an hour as police and fire crews gathered below.

Mr King-Thompson reached the 73rd floor where authorities forced him to get into a maintenance cradle and enter the building, a fire department official said, adding that police took him into custody for questioning.

Police were not immediately available for comment.

In 2019, Mr King-Thompson was reportedly arrested and eventually sentenced to six months in prison after a civil lawsuit for climbing the Shard building in London.

But instead of curbing his desire to climb, those long months intensified it. “I made a list of all the buildings in prison,” he told The Independent in an interview in 2020.

“Agbar was one of them,” he said, referring to 144m tower in Barcelona.

“It’s mystical, like I’d gone to a different dimension,” he said of his experience of scaling the Agbar Tower. “It’s an almost unintelligible sensation, when you’re solely free.”

The climb itself, he says, was the “perfect challenge”, not as logistically exhausting as the Shard, but still “a war between myself and the building, my body and my mind”.

In all, it took him around just 20 minutes to scale it, moving constantly for the first 100m to avoid losing momentum, using the corners of window panes to keep stable.

He said the “fear was intoxicating, an unsurpassable adrenaline rush, which gave fuel to every strained sinew”. And after safely making his descent, and briefly being taken to a police station for questioning, the euphoria took hold.

“I’ve never felt so content,” he says. “Which is very unusual for me.”