Attitude check: this is one of those pieces about “space left over” — the way skateboarders occupy the spaces left by the architects and colonise our deserted city spaces. In this case the place was Telford. We’d been lured there by a reader, Peter Medlicott, and made a pilgrimage to inspect yet another new town. My most vivid memory of this was hearing one side of a conversation between Ben Wheeler and his Mum, who presumably thought he was down the road at the South Bank. “Yes, Telford, I think…. Somewhere past Birmingham…”
I loved these trips, even if the results were sometime dismal. This, not the competitions, was what it was really about.

SCARY PLACES?

SHOW NOT TELL

W H E R E I S T H I S ?
W H A T I S T H I S ?
D O E S I T M A T T E R ?

Here are more
Pictures of
Everyman skating
In Everytown.
It could be
Your town
It could
Be you.

USUAL BIT

New towns feel like they’re waiting. The empty buildings, the deserted walkways heading off to somewhere that hasn’t been built yet, the neatly landscaped bits-in-between with benches which have never been sat on, all feel like they’re waiting for someone to come along and wake them up. It’s worst on Sundays. On Sundays they’re like desolate wastes, abandonned even by the builders, absolutely dead — until the skaters bring them life. These pictures were taken on such a Sunday.

CAPTIONS
Wide flat areas with delightful discrete railings scattered all around. Reuben