It’s not hard to spot Sébastien Foucan even amid several hundred tourists swarming towards the London Eye along the capital’s South Bank. He’s the one vaulting off benches and flipping over railings as he approaches.

Straightforward walking is not an option when you’re the founder of free running, a sort of street sport — though most practitioners call it an art — that treats the concrete jungle as an urban play zone, full of obstacles to be scaled, hopped over or jumped off.

Foucan, 34, is the Bruce Lee of free running — as he proved in the opening scenes of Casino Royale, the last Bond film, in which he leapt wildly around a Madagascan construction site with 007 in hot — if less elegant — pursuit.

Free running is Foucan’s more acrobatic version of parkour, the sport he pioneered with his friend David Belle, while they were living in Lisses, on the outskirts of Paris. Parkour evolved out of a military training technique called méthode naturelle, developed by Georges Hébert, a French naval officer, who was inspired by the supple and acrobatic movements of the African tribesmen he met on his travels before the first world war.

Parkour is all about moving efficiently through the environment, but with free running, Foucan is more concerned with self-expression. “Free running is the art of expressing yourself in your environment without limitations; it is the art of movement and action,” is his suitably Gallic description.

“When we began we were influenced by many things, particularly martial arts and especially Bruce Lee, who is an inspiration to me,” he says. “When I read the Tao of Jeet Kune Do [written by Lee] it showed me the way to grow and evolve free running. I take from everything: Ashtanga yoga, gymnastics, even break dancing.”

Foucan has just published the first book in Britain about free running, entitled Free Running: Find Your Way, which is full of dramatic photographs showing him leaping off walls, climbing fences, shimmying up drainpipes and jumping between buildings.

Perhaps the most incredible image shows Foucan’s silhouette high in the air above the Millennium stadium in Cardiff, completing a breathtaking jump across a gap between either side of the retractable roof. “I don’t look down,” he says by way of explaining how he had the nerve to do it.

“We checked the landing and takeoff to see there was no possibility of slipping. We checked the weather, the wind, everything, and after that it was just a jump across a gap to me.”

Foucan also toured with Madonna and starred in the video for her single Jump in 2006. He’s also about to star in The Tournament, a film about assassins starring Robert Carlyle. And this time he’s determined to do all his stunts — because that bit in the Bond film where he jumped between a series of cranes, well, it wasn’t actually him. For insurance purposes the makers insisted a stuntman make the jump.

“Casino Royale was fun but they didn’t let me do the leap between the cranes,” he explains with evident anguish. “I wanted to but they wouldn’t let me, so in the new movie I made sure I did all my own stunts. I don’t want to give away too much but I’m the bad guy again and I was working with moving obstacles, vehicles.”

Foucan’s parents moved to France from Guadeloupe in the Caribbean and he grew up in Lisses, working as a firefighter for a couple of years, a job that almost wrote off his future career before jump-off. Helping to direct an inexperienced driver into the depot, he found himself trapped between the fire engine and a pillar.

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