Parkour feels like a thoroughly modern discipline – it grew up on the internet, after all – but its roots go back more than a century, through a French naval officer, a military firefighter and a teenager in a Parisian suburb with something to prove. Here’s the whole story, from 1902 to Sheffield.
Parkour history at a glance
- 1902 – naval officer Georges Hébert helps evacuate Saint-Pierre, Martinique, after a volcanic eruption; the experience shapes his belief that fitness should make you useful
- 1900s–1910s – Hébert develops the méthode naturelle, training built on natural movement
- Mid-century – his ideas shape French military training, including the parcours du combattant obstacle course
- 1960s–70s – Raymond Belle, trained in that tradition, becomes one of the Paris fire brigade’s most celebrated rescuers
- Late 1980s – his son David and friends begin training seriously in Lisses and Évry
- 1997 – the group becomes the Yamakasi; their practice is l’art du déplacement
- 2001 – Luc Besson’s film Yamakasi brings the group to French cinema audiences
- 2002 – David Belle crosses London’s rooftops in the BBC One Rush Hour ident
- 2003 – Channel 4’s Jump London airs; the word “freerunning” is coined
- 2005 – Jump Britain airs – and Sheffield Parkour & Freerunning is founded
Georges Hébert and the natural method
In 1902, French naval officer Georges Hébert helped evacuate the town of Saint-Pierre in Martinique during the eruption of Mount Pelée. What he saw convinced him that physical training had one true purpose: to make you capable of acting when it matters. His motto – être fort pour être utile, “be strong to be useful” – could serve as parkour’s mission statement today.
Hébert spent the following decades building the méthode naturelle: a training system based on natural human movement – running, jumping, climbing, balancing, crawling, swimming – practised over real terrain rather than in gymnasiums. His ideas shaped French military training for generations, including the parcours du combattant, the assault course that would eventually lend parkour its name.
Raymond Belle
Raymond Belle learned that tradition the hard way, through military schooling in Vietnam as a boy, and later became one of the Paris fire brigade’s most decorated rescuers – celebrated for feats of strength, agility and composure under pressure. His stories of moving through obstacles with purpose landed on his son David like a challenge.
Lisses, David Belle and the Yamakasi
In the suburbs of Lisses and Évry in the late 1980s, David Belle and a group of friends turned that inheritance into something new: testing themselves against walls, gaps and drops, repeating movements hundreds of times until they were dependable. By 1997 the group had a name – the Yamakasi – and their practice had one too: l’art du déplacement, the art of movement.
As the group’s members later followed their own paths, the practice gathered its other names: Belle’s strand became parkour, and Sébastien Foucan’s expressive style would soon be christened freerunning – we’ve told that naming story in full in parkour vs freerunning, and David Belle’s remarkable life gets a post of its own.
The world catches on
French films and adverts gave the discipline its first mainstream exposure – Luc Besson’s Yamakasi (2001) and later District 13 (2004) among them. In the UK, everything changed with the 2002 BBC Rush Hour ident and two Channel 4 documentaries, Jump London (2003) and Jump Britain (2005) – a story we’ve covered in its own post. By the mid-2000s, kids in every British city were learning to vault.
Parkour in Sheffield
Some of those kids were here. Our club was founded in 2005, in that first wave of British parkour, and we’ve trained continuously ever since – the longest-running parkour community in the city. Read our story, or skip the history lesson entirely and come to a free session.
David Belle is credited as parkour’s founder, though he’d be the first to say it was developed collectively with the Yamakasi – and built on foundations laid by his father Raymond and by Georges Hébert’s natural method.
The practice took shape in the late 1980s and 1990s in the Paris suburbs; the name “parkour” was adopted in the late 1990s. Its training philosophy, though, traces back to the early 1900s.
It’s adapted from the French parcours – “course” or “route” – via the parcours du combattant, the military obstacle course. A traceur’s “route” is wherever they choose to take it.
Watch the history yourself
- Jump London (Channel 4, 2003) – the film that brought parkour to Britain
- Jump Britain (Channel 4, 2005) – the sequel that lit up the UK scene
- Yamakasi (2001) – Luc Besson’s film starring the founding group
- District 13 (2004) – David Belle’s action showcase