When We Was Rad: Skateboard History from UK Vintage Magazine

Death Box, Hot Wheels and Skate Zone shared this advertising page. The Death Box advert featured Wurzel’s board, but with a teaser mention of Mac’s freestyle and bank model being in the pipeline. At this stage Jeremy Fox was also distributing Flyaway helmets, but the future was in the boards — as he knew then and we all know now. But at this point Flip was a few years away.
Hot Wheels promoted the No Ped scooter, while Skate Zone took their place as a skateshop with a history.

“High powered skating. Lucian’s Madonnas are FAST and HIGH. This one over the channel at the Brighton ramp screams agression and style.” The caption says everything.

At last… And what a ramp to be reminded of as well.

Lucian Hendrickse has been skating most of his life. He started as a little kid and he never stopped. In that time he’s seen, done and said a lot.

Hosoi, Skull Skates, Alva, Brand X, Dogtown, Uncle Wiggley, Blockhead, Kryptonics and Santa Monica Airlines – that’s an emotive list of brands. There’s quite a variety of shapes on offer here. Some of them may be gimmicky, and all of them seem from another world now, but this is definitely one for the hardware fetishists looking for old school skateboards.
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Here’s another classic skateboard shop advert from the eighties. Skate’n'Surf in Southsea, take a bow. Powell T Shirts were £11.95 and there was a whole section for stickers. Meanwhile an equally venerable bike shop, Youngs Cycles, were holding the fort for BMX.

Skull and Bones meets Hawaii. Mostly skulls and bones actually. Gaze on these and wonder.

Nick Philip interviewed Mike Canning for the BMX interview in this issue, conducted at a time when the balance between skating and BMX freestyle was at a very difficult stage. At this point BMX riding seemed to be more about quarter pipes than halfpipes. Twiglets… Ramps like Mon’s had always had both types of users, but at other places there was more tension, even if riders like Mike Canning would get respect from anyone who was not blind. Continue Reading »

Faze 7 were one of the tiny number of old-time skateboard shops who were able to re-emerge with the revival of skating in 1987. They’d survived the dark ages on the usual mixture of rollerskates and BMX, but now their time had come again. Continue Reading »

A very seasonal tale indeed detailing the past, present and future of skateboarding. Don Brider, Wurzel, Rob Abel and Jeremy Fox all make some kind of appearance, but not the Ginger Lamo himself?

Another advert – and you can’t even read this one, so no chance of shedding a tear about prices in the good old days. At this stage many of the shops advertising in R.a.D were combining skateboards with BMX, a painful process for them as well as for the magazine. Since you can’t see the prices in this dot matrix advert, here are some examples: Continue Reading »