Jay Podesta’s photograph shows Will Bankhead skating ‘somewhere in the City’. This was around the time that the City of London started to get really hostile to skateboarders.

Do you get pissed off with people coming on better than you on the grounds that their skating (or type of skating) is better than yours? It’s fashionable to take the piss out of kids who get hung up about who can do what tricks. But the people who take the piss are careful to maintain their particular status. It’s not how high you can Ollie, for them, but the point remains the same — ‘I’m better than you’. In this case because ‘I’ am into a ‘better’ form of skating.
This prejudiced view has established a set hierarchy: concrete, good; big vert ramps, nearly as good; mini-ramps, bad. Just as some do-gooders insist that skateboard graphics are the work of devil, so some skaters carry on as if satan had come up with the idea of the mini. They forget that skating is constantly changing: that when they first took to riding back yard pools most ‘skaters’ were more into spinning 360s or racing down hills. Or maybe they don’t forget? Maybe deep down they fear the new?