When We Was Rad: Skateboard History from UK Vintage Magazine

If you’re interested in the history of skateboarding in Britain, this site contains original vintage UK skateboard material from the eighties and nineties which originally appeared in R.a.D Magazine.

This is an exercise in skateboard nostalgia for old school skaters and a glimpse of the roots of British skating for historians and people researching street culture: part of the Long Tail for skateboarding in the U.K. There are also hints of what life was like producing magazines in the days before desktop publishing.

Interesting to notice that Fids nominated Stevenage as his favourite ramp even though he came from Ramsgate. That’s a sign of the times: he had to travel into London and out the other side to skate it.

His answer to the question “What would make skating better?” — “Better weather or more indoor ramps” touches on the same subject. We got the “more indoor ramps”, though never enough of them. The weather did not get better. Quite the reverse. This has been one of the wettest winters in a while.

And the thought I like best? “Carter doing McTwists” it makes me smile even now.

More about Bowes Lyon Skatepark in Stevenage.

In this selection of letters we have

• Mad Snoz and his cohorts writing about Dirty Ditches, but where?
• Livi Skates thanking everyone who came for Pure Fun
• Partying on the Isle of Wight
• Vallely on vert (lots of it) at Latimer
• A Picture of Don B
• and our email address from 1988 = Telecom Gold 72:MAG90459

I’d forgotten that we kept that old address going. I thought it had died out with BMX Action Bike.

Off Beat Sportz take the prize this time for their “We Like Cats and Dogs Price List” tag line. What was that all about, then?
Action Ramps deserve some other kind of prize for breaking down the humble jump-ramp into a whole series of components.
Meanwhile Youngs favoured the “long copy” approach, Split went for the big claim (but it was certainly true the time I went there) and Weston BMX and Leisure turned sideways to fit it all in.
Each of the shops had a distinctive style and a crew of locals to match in the days before chain stores sold skateboards!

At some point I knew I would run out of interesting things to say about “The Wall”. That moment has come.
It was intended as the Craigslist for UK skateboarding of its time and delighted me when it turned into Myspace. But I’m stretching things too far again. Time to shut up!

Interesting bits in here…

• The overview of what we described as ‘the streetstyle device‘: state of the art at the time was: ‘Bank, quarter-pipe and mini-handrail all in one unit.” Now you see things like that all over the place. They’ve become a standard item in public and commercial parks. In 1988 this seemed like a first to us: “You could do three moves in one hit.”
• Quote of the street-style event: “Oh well, I guess I’ll make up for that in my second run…” Mike Vallely after his ‘first’ qualifier. They had one run each.
• Stuart Dryden, from Southsea, who came over from Southsea and entered in the days when travelling to competitions like this was beyond the reach of most people.

These were the killer things which lodged in Shane [O'Brien's] memory. Gonzales’ Ollie Stalefish Method 180 and Railslide regular footed [we were amazed by switch-stance then]. Cab’s Backside 180 Ollies off the jump ramp. Vallely’s 360 Frontside Hand-plant on the double-sided jump ramp. And Hosoi’s Frontside Wall-ride when his back foot slipped leaving him hanging off the top of the wall with his front foot keeping hold of the board. After a few sweaty moments, he shuffled the board back up and rode out. Delirium

Oh dear. Back in the days before desktop publishing you did not know what things would look like until you got the magazines back from the printers. Unless you could afford proofs, which we could not. So the yellow tint behind some of this worked OK, but the magenta one makes it impossible to read the text. Such was life back then.

The sidebar at the bottom is about an incident I had long forgotten. On the day of the finals neither Christian Hosoi nor Eric Dressen showed up. Both were still asleep. Somehow someone woke up Hosoi and got him to the hall. Eric Dressen slept on. There were murmurs that this was because Hosoi was considered the bigger ’star’ by the organisers and the feelings came to head with a bit of a fight at the post-contest party.

What an amazing issue this was. So much stuff all happening in one month. This was the seventh Munster World Cup and Europe had never seen anything on this scale in the eighties. It would rate as pretty big even by today’s standards. And the quality of the skating would also stand the test of time, I think.

All the pictures in this opening spread were by Dobie.

Skating in Europe’s going mad. No doubt about it. Every year the competition at Munster in Germany gets bigger but this, the seventh one, was even better than everyone had expected.

It started out as purely European competition, but gradually more and more Americans joined in. This year there were dozens of them. The Munster World Cup was a world class event: the first real one since the Vancouver Worlds a couple of years back.

• Sick Colours!
• Melt Your Eyeballs!
• Bright and Sticky!

I hope Billy’s will forgive me if I dwell on the R.a.D Magazine sticker advert this time. This one honours the designer of the logo, and master of the spanked-up Xerox art, Nick Philip. That’s Nick’s face squashed on the photo-copier montaged in with the R.a.d logo.

After working on R.a.d Nick moved to California, where he has been involved in many wonderful things over the years. Right now he’s back with his roots, applying his special vision to clothing: in this case astonishing T shirts where the design covers the whole shirt.

Those who remember some of the early Anarchic Adjustment shirts, which covered your chest in so much plastic ink that they felt like a bullet-proof vest, will be reassured to know that these use a new sublimation print system which allows the broad canvas without making the shirt feel like it’s made out of sailcloth.

I love the caption on the picture here: “Birmingham Wheels’ Finest”. The endless fear of being rude about any skate spot, on the grounds that it might be all the local skaters had, meant that most of the time the Where? guide was painfully neutral. Not so the contributors. “Take a broom” says the comment about the old council skatepark in South Ockenden (which can still be read in the Knowhere version of this guide, even though the park is long gone.

This is the one part of R.a.D Magazine which lives on as more than just a memory. It moved on line in 1994 and can still be found at www.knowhere.co.uk although the content is very different now.

I see from the introduction that we introduced a new rating system with this issue of the magazine. There’s a wistful tone to the observation that few people would expect to travel more than 10 or 20 miles to skate, and that no ditch could ever rate 5 stars. In the old days (the old days then) some of us used to travel from one end of the country to another in order skate something like Monk’s Ditch. Or, more to the point, to skate with other people at Monk’s Ditch.

What would the skaters of 1988 have made of the situation 20 years later? What would the skaters of 1980 have made of it? I think only the skaters of 1978 would have dared imagine a world of mini-parks all over the place and mega parks dotting the land. We got what we longed for. How does it feel?