When We Was Rad

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. It 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.

Here’s a Mambo advert which did not get us into trouble the Advertising Standards Authority and nor did it cause us to be denounced from pulpits. Some of their other efforts had those effects.

There isn’t really much more to say about this, is there?

The 1988 Powell Team tour was so rad. If you caught them you’re stoking. If you didn’t you will be: we’ve got the highlights of the official demos AND all the fun bits that went on in between. Because if you thought they just sat in some hotel room in between the shows you’re very, very wrong. They’re skaters after all. What would you do when you weren’t demoing? Turn the page and find out…

Captions:
Steve Caballero: boosts that filthy boneless at Stevenage
Mike Vallely: 360 Mute at Stevenage after the stopped ramp play

Both photos by Dobie

At the time of writing, Southsea Skatepark is under threat and there is a petition to save it here: http://petitions.pm.gov.uk/save-southsea/

The pictures come from a happier time, with the park under the supervision of John Thurston and and visited by all manner of legends, as we see here.

This was the opening page of an 11 page feature on the Powell Tour. At the time those tours were hugely important. They brought some extremely rad skating to the UK when there were no international competitions or other events to attract hordes of top skaters.

Tours like this one provided the only chance for most people to see skating at this level and were the focus for a vast amount of energy.

Captions:
Tommy Guerrero: at Southsea he got down and skated. Ollie (huge) to (tweaked) Slob off the launch ramp.
Lance Mountain: different — Stalefish Boneless at Meanwhile

The Lance Mountain picture was by Dobie.

There’s also an unofficial Southsea Skatepark site and a page about the skatepark on the Portsmouth Council site.

In 1989 it was very strange to see a soft drink advert in a skateboard magazine. The idea of such a high-profile brand taking any interest in skateboarding was a novelty. There had been such adverts back at the end of the seventies, perhaps (Fanta comes to mind), but that was a long time ago.
Looking back on this twenty years later it now turns out to have been the start of a deluge. One which swept away many of the aspects of skateboarding in the eighties which had made it so appealing.

Livingston skatepark has always placed the emphasis on pure fun, rather than serious competition. There was a competition on this day, complete with judges, but at the end they announced that everyone had placed first. My type of competition. Events like this were also a great chance to print pictures of people doing strange and gnarly things rather than concentrating purely on the latest and most ambitious trick. A happy day all round.

Bother! I wish I had the text for this page on a disk. Oh well, here goes. The part of this which I want to get on line is the side-bar about Iain Urquhart. He was one of my skateboarding heroes, as you can tell:

How Livingston Happened

So you think you’ve got problems getting a half-pipe built now? Imagine convincing the council that they should build a proper concrete skatepark. And now think about doing that in 1981, when skating was (as far as the general public was concerned) ‘dead’.

But that’s exactly what happened. As a result Livingston ended up with a facility which is the envy of the rest of the country and which has been sessioned heavily on wheels of one kind or another ever since. In fact it’s now sometimes too busy to skate.

The driving force behind this was Iain Urquhart, an architect who worked on leisure facilities for the Livingston Development Corporation and who was fully into skating. It took him years to convince them to build the park. During that time he visited as many other parks as possible, learning from all the other mistakes and taking advice from everyone who skated them. He fine-tuned the design of his park right up until the last minute (the flat bottom in the bowl was a late addition).

Think about it: if he could do that at a time when skating was so small, imagine what someone with as much drive could do now. That someone could be you. But there’s another lesson to be learned too: if he hadn’t been prepared to get down into the setting concrete and fight for the surface he knew was so important, Iain Urquhart might have seen his dream realised as another kinked-out waste of money.

Your involvement mustn’t stop with the plans, it mustn’t stop when you’ve got the money and the go-ahead: you’ve got to see the whole thing through or someone along the line will mess it up. That kind of dedication is rare: so far the skate scene has seen only one such individual. He died a year or so after completing the park — but what a memorial we’ve got.

I’m pleased to have added that to the digital record, even if I did have to type it again. Perhaps I’d better have another go at scanning the rest of the story.

On another strange note: years later, in another life, but in the same small world, a friend of my wife revealed “I was in Rad magazine once…” and we dug out the issue and there he is, with another friend who I also now know, standing next to Jeremy Fox. Two young skaters enjoying their big day out at Livingston. All of us part of an interwoven strand of events, pulled together in this case by the legacy of Livingston skatepark. And on this particular occasion by the huge and continuing efforts of Kenny and Eleanor Omond, whose huge role in Livingston’s history was not really made clear enough in this piece. I regret that.

Blue sky picture feast from the finest bit of British concrete at the time. I don’t know which makes me smile more at this distance: Davie Philip’s style or the pure-fun aspects of the other two pictures.

It also suddenly strikes me that it’s been a very long time since I’ve been to Livingston and I miss it. Livi was a hugely important place for me in the eighties, alongside Crystal Palace and Harrow: it shaped my notion of skateboarding.

Very rare to see a whole page devoted to pictures of one skater. But in the case of Jamie Blair at Livingston, it makes perfect sense. Along with Davie Philip, Jamie Blair was a huge influence at this time, both through his skating and through the pioneering “Skater Owned Shop”, Clan Skates in Glasgow. They were also both extremely friendly people, with a remarkably calm aura which somehow permeated their skating. Jamie’s style was never more assured than at Livingston.

I was talking about Livingston at the “goodbye to Harrow Day” last week. With Harrow and Southsea under threat we’re heading towards a situation where Livingston will be one of the oldest skateparks in Britain (I hope Rom’s still OK). At the time this story was written, though, I still thought of it as “new” and “state of the art” — even though this competition was staged to celebrate the first re-surfacing and the first of the improvements, in the form of coping.

People came from far and wide to celebrate the re-opening. I can certainly see Brighton represented by one of the five, yes five, people in the opening shot of the new bowl/pool at the bottom of this page.

Livingston was the greatest of British parks at this time because it had been designed and built with care after the early mistakes and just before the idea of building any facilities for skateboarding would have seemed a waste of money. In fact for decades Scotland probably had the greatest park in Europe.