One of the most common questions we get asked is, what does STORROR mean? It's always seemed funny to us that people are so interested in the meaning of a word we’re so familiar with but, now we think about it, obviously, it is a strange name for a parkour team.
Often people assume it’s some sort of anagram of our initials, or it’s a foreign language word, but the truth is actually the most unbelievable.We've never explained fully before why the team is called STORROR, but it all begins with an ancient story. This story has been passed down through generations, so the details are not completely clear but to the best of our knowledge, this is as accurate as possible.
A long time ago, there was a man called Stora Cave who lived alone on the English moors. He was said to have had a large grey beard, and often wore a long black coat and a hat with three points. He had no wife or children, just dogs to keep him company. During his solitary life, Stora made an important discovery in veterinary medicine, specifically for sheep, and so was massively admired by his siblings, nieces and nephews.
When he passed away, the family began a tradition to honour his name since he had no children to carry it on. From that time onwards, all members of the Cave family bloodline were given Stora as their middle name.
It’s unclear when the spelling changed, but when Max and Benj Cave was born in the early 1990s both of them, together with eleven other members of their family, had Storror entered on their birth certificates as a middle name. Growing up, Max and Benj were very aware of how bizarre their middle name was and tended to keep it quiet to avoid having to explain the long story.
The Cave brothers began parkour in 2006 with a team and a YouTube channel both called NorthPoint, named after an office building that was a favourite parkour spot in their home town of Horsham in West Sussex. NorthPoint lasted until 2008 when they joined forces with fellow Horsham locals Drew Taylor, Steven Whitley and Luke Harty, and started another channel - Horsham Movement.
At this time there was a standard formula for making parkour videos. Every season the best training clips would be uploaded into a montage with a hip-hop beat. That’s how everyone did it, long serious logs of training.
The idea for a different type of channel emerged in the autumn of 2010. The Caves hated the strict formula of parkour videos and wanted to break the mould. They decided to start a channel with no rules, somewhere they could upload anything they wanted.
They needed a new name, and instantly Storror came to mind. Unfortunately, when they went to register the channel, that was already taken. Instead, they used a similar username that was automatically suggested by YouTube, which was MrTheStorror, and signed up on 9th October 2010. Fortunately, they forgot the password!
The very next day on 10.10.10 (and, legend has it, the time was around 10 pm) Max and Benj tried again, this time with the username StorrorBlog. The channel was born.
Originally we only planned to upload 30 episodes, but by episode 10 it was obvious we were onto something unique. The Horsham contingent met Callum and Sacha Powell, Toby Segar and Josh Burnett-Blake through parkour while travelling around for events and jams. The team line-up formed organically and sort of chose itself.
Subscriber and viewing figures for StorrorBlog quickly exceeded all of our other channels, and the parkour community started to know us as team STORROR. We were super lucky to stumble across a brand name that is so perfect. A word that only means what it is.
