When We Was Rad: Skateboard History from UK Vintage Magazine

Small Room, Walker, Mike Smith’s Liberty and Shut — there were some interesting smaller brands advertised here alongside the usual suspects. Everything at Your Leisure also stayed true to their BMX roots.

Reuben Goodyear is shown on on the dodgy plywood end of the skateboard ramp spectrum. More lamp-post silliness guaranteed to keep skating out of the Olympics.

NEW BIT

This is not about this town. It is not about these people. This feature is about the shapes and the things some people skated some where. There is nothing more to be SAID, but plenty more will be SHOWN.

CAPTIONS:
It’s stuff like this that keeps skating out of the Olympics and gives us all a bad name
Like an ocean going liner, this proud building tries to ignore the antics of the ordinary people around it. Reuben.

Ben Wheeler, Peter Medlicott and various others are pictured skating those essential items: bits of old ply and brick banks. It’s our world; we enjoy it.

The skaters take the spaces the others ignore. They use the junk the builders leave lying around. They explore and enjoy their new surroundings, they don’t feel threatened by them. It happens now as it has always happened: the neat little figures on the architect’s pretty sketch are replaced by real people doing real and often different things. In another real world. Our world. Enjoy.

CAPTIONS:
In the indoor market there are these tables… Peter Medlicott
So much building going on, so much space in yet-to-open car parks, so much ply lying around. Ben

I’d forgotten that Neil Danns rode for Pacer at one point alongside Gary Lee. An interesting aspect of this advert is that it mentions British Standards BS5715 for skateboards. Pacer were already aiming for the mass-market which was about to appear, but at this juncture they were ahead of the time.

Curbs, caps and a key move from the period. Melanchollies defined the style of the day, as much as the Chinos defined the look.

CAPTION: Free-standing curbs of a kind rare near his home, inspire a melancholy skater. Travel fires the imagination. Ben

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. Continue Reading »

This advert ran many, many times and Vision shoes seemed everywhere for a while. But the true impact of skate shoes was yet to come.

This fascinated me: news of a skateboard park in an old public swimming pool in Grantham. It had been there for years, largely ignored by the skateboard establishment. We thought we knew it all, but we didn’t:

GRANTHAM

In issue 81 you asked for more information about Grantham. You’re correct about the ramp being in the old swimming pool. The ramp’s size is 8′ transitions to 8′ high, 16′ wide with 12′ of flat bottom, steel coping and 4′ platforms. The rest of the park consists of 45 banks to walls, no lips, from 4′ high to about 8′ high in a U shape around a central mogul.

The town itself has some good skateable areas such as the leisure centre, with sloping walls, benches, steps, a hand-rail (no run out) and a 50 yard long 60 bank with a curb on top, good for rock slides. Nearby is a garage with two 45 banked hips with curbs on top. Morrisons’ car park has free-standing curbs and painted curbs and walls. B&Q building site with walls and very slidey grindy curbs about 14~.009 high going downhill and round a corner. Much more in town and a private mini-ramp outside of town (invitation only)
Dave Aspland
Grantham
PS 30p per session. Sessions 9.00-12.30, 1.30- sunset. Helmets and pads sometimes required, although not usually at weekends. BMX not usually allowed, but Zach got away with it.

WARNINGUse this list very carefully. Some of these places are far from hot. Use your head: check before making a long journey. Be very careful about places marked ~.069: they aren’t proper skate places as such, people have just written in and said they’re good to skate. And be careful out there: some of the inner city sites may be a bit gnarly if you’re not used to that kind of thing.

If you know somewhere we should list, write and tell us. Tell us where it is, what it is and what you think of it. Don’t forget to include your name, address and telephone number so we can check the details. Write to: Where?

A DIFFERENT WARNING: This list has been compiled over the last ten years. Whilst the information contained in it is freely available to those prepared to invest the effort, the errors are the stuff of art. Some of them have been maturing for years. One day we’ll clean them up, but right now there’s more fun to be had. Use your head: if all you want to do is skate these places you won’t go wrong. Copyright: Deltamere Ltd/ Tim Leighton-Boyce

KEY

+ Worth a visit if you’re passing. ++ Worth a visit if you’re in town. +++ Worth a visit if you’re in the area. ++++ Worth a visit. +++++ Definitely worth a visit. Opening times, cost etc unknown Free, unsupervised ! Not a designated skate place Private – check opening times and cost # Commercial – check opening times and cost

CAPTIONS: Leamington Spa. Chaos
Bath. Solid
Alex Moul. Rad

I’ve nothing to say about these two adverts. There’s honesty for you.

Much fuss is made of Bath’s new metal-surfaced ramp in the introduction to this guide. History says that was a mistake. Leamington Spa also gets a mention — it was later to have a major impact on British skating as the birthplace of Legends, who crossed skating over into a High Street shopping experience.

THIS MONTH

We’ve just been to take a look at a couple of new minis. The one at the boy’s club in Leamington Spa isn’t totally new, but it’s just been extended. They invited SS20 down for a demo to mark the opening of the new wide version and the result was total snaking mayhem. Creative chaos with some familiar and some unfamiliar faces.
Continue Reading »