When We Was Rad: Skateboard History from UK Vintage Magazine

“Xs” was the name of the slot for a single page stand alone picture. It followed on from BMX Action Bike’s “Radness Unlimited”. We felt unhappy with the Action Bike name and came up with something equally bad. The main point was that it was meant to be the first powerful hit in the magazine. Sometimes it was; sometimes it wasn’t. In this case Xs featured Craig Campbell, which means that it was.
As the caption said: Continue Reading »

I have no idea why the coverage of this ESA competition at Preston was slotted in to two pages of “Ears”. Perhaps we didn’t have enough space anywhere else for it?

The Preston ramp was another ramp in a roller-rink from the same people as the legendary Warrington. Paul Duffy’s picture shows Mark Van Der Eng. The A Group result is described as “surprising” Continue Reading »

The team referred to the news pages of the magazine as “Ears”, but the tagline “Communicating Knowledge” was more prominent.

It was always a real struggle assembling the content for this section. Endless hours were spent ringing round to try to extract information from the skate world at large in an age before email, text messages or even widespread use of mobile phones. Communication then was much more painful: it was a relatively closed world.

“Knebworth to Go” was the first story, on the perennial theme of the lack of places to skate. Continue Reading »

Original photograph of Steve Douglas at Raging Waters was by Luke Ogden. The credit has been written on by hand. I assume we must have forgotten to have it typeset: at this time we were setting type direct from disk (which involved learning codes which make raw HTML seem easy). We dropped the disks off at the typesetters late at night and collected the finished galley output the next day. So if something was wrong, or missing, we frequently had to adapt and make do.

At this stage there was still a fair bit of BMX content, and also the dreaded scooters.

Features

• Ears Extra 5
  ESA Series, Preston
• Raging Waters 8
  The hottest ramp in the world
• WORDS WITH Mike Canning 16
  Mad ramp ride mellows out
• Lucian Hendrickse 22
  Talks like he skates: hard and fast
• Checking out: Pacer Street Scoot 33
  Look at these
• Win a Scooter 37
  Take one home
• Holeshot IV Preview 40
  Who’s coming

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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. Continue Reading »

Is this serious? Well, since this is all about nostalgia, the adverts from the period may also be relevant! Somebody, somewhere might find these interesting.
In this case we have Atari promoting the home computer version of 720. My recollection is that people like Steve Caballero provided the source material for this, Continue Reading »

58 was the eighth issue of the real R.a.D magazine, and the first issue to be posted on this site. The reason for starting with this issue is that the cover date was “Christmas 1987″ which corresponds to Novemember/December of the first year of the magazine.


The strapline on this issue was “Number One for Skateboards Streetstyle and Street Action” (clear evidence that the influence of Gavin Hills was yet to be felt) and the BMX Action Bike logo was still in evidence, although very small by this stage.
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This is not meant as a substitute for the book or the exhibition which has been discussed on Old Skaters.

That idea is still going ahead, as far as I’m concerned. But that’s a very long term thing.

At the moment I happen to have a bit of time on my hands (!) so I feel this is an opportunity to experiment with getting some of the material published in a way which allows people to see it again, and to add their own recollections or comments if they wish.