When We Was Rad: Skateboard History from UK Vintage Magazine

Quote of the Harrow Day for me was someone stopping me when I was getting all sorrowful about the loss of a classic skatepark (”the first Ollies in Britain were done here, as far as I know” etc etc). “But you don’t have to skate it, Tim.”

I was talking about Livingston at the “goodbye to Harrow Day” last week. With Harrow and Southsea under threat we’re heading towards a situation where Livingston will be one of the oldest skateparks in Britain (I hope Rom’s still OK). At the time this story was written, though, I still thought of it as “new” and “state of the art” — even though this competition was staged to celebrate the first re-surfacing and the first of the improvements, in the form of coping.

People came from far and wide to celebrate the re-opening. I can certainly see Brighton represented by one of the five, yes five, people in the opening shot of the new bowl/pool at the bottom of this page.

Livingston was the greatest of British parks at this time because it had been designed and built with care after the early mistakes and just before the idea of building any facilities for skateboarding would have seemed a waste of money. In fact for decades Scotland probably had the greatest park in Europe.

This Death Box “Pete Dossett” advert looks like one which might have a story behind it. Although it seems fairly roughly put together, it uses two spot colours, which means that it would normally have been expensive.

Death Box were still just starting out (in fact the company is called “Dee See Supplies” in this advert), so the colour would have been a big investment.

I wonder what was going on? Did Billy Brown push them into the extra cost, or did he cut them a deal? Was the colour and afterthought?

I’ve just finished reading a novel which deals with someone trying to stitch together events from the past from fragmentary details (”In Another Light” by Andrew Grieg), so that probably explains why this thought intrigues me now. But that’s a work of fiction, and Flip is very real: these are fragments from a true story.

You can tell a lot about the state of skateboarding in 1988 from this list.

On the ‘big, organised’ front we have the AES competition series contests in Belgium and Prague. Coming up on the inside is ‘commerce discovers skateboarding’ in the form of the Rockit/Swatch Skate Tour in Narbarth and Newquay. But the ones which really speak of what was happening for me are “Street Sesh” in Church Square, Scunthorpe and the enigmatic “Meet 12 Central Library” listed for Birmingham on August 28th.

Skateboarding behind the Iron Curtain (then still just about hanging on) was a sign of bigger changes to come. So was the Swatch Rockit tour within our own little world. But, for me, it was the stuff in Birmingham and Scunthorpe which really mattered.

In fact I think I was delighted when I got caught up in traffic and missed the plane to Czechoslovakia. I hated all those big competitions and I’m not sure how I would have reacted to Western skaters discovering that they could afford to drink restaurants dry in the days before stag and hen parties became regular sights in Prague.

The roots of R.a.D were in the skateboard dark ages: the time when skateboarding was underground. Although we wanted everyone to share our passion and wanted everyone to skate, I for one didn’t really wanted the trappings which were to come with mass acceptance.

If you can get to Harrow Skatepark, April 19th would be a good day to do so. It’s likely to be the last ever Harrow Day, unless the Council change their minds about demolishing the park. I was there on the day that Tony Alvan and Mark Baker officially opened the park, and Harrow is where I learnt to take pictures of skateboarding. I owe a lot to Harrow Skatepark.

The legendary Mac was responsible for pioneering freestyle/street/bank crossovers (540 on banks, anyone?), the original Death Box graphics, and the R.a.D cartoon for a while.

I wonder where he is now? In 2007 Jeremy Fox was trying to track him down for the Death Box European reunion, but had a bit of a struggle.

Mac, if you’re reading this, I hope it’s OK to have this scan here?

Now that I’ve got the ability to speak in the present tense and break out of the limitations of “another scanned page from the old magazine” theme, I have the chance to refer to things like the kind words about this thing (and Rollin’ Through the Decades) on Skate and Annoy recently. I really like the style there: it feels just right and somehow familiar. I was hugely flattered to read what they had to say.

I don’t normally go in for self-regarding nonsense about this site. After all, the whole thing is self-regarding material about something from the past, and I need to draw a line somewhere. But I’ve recently upgraded to a new version of Wordpress and have taken the opportunity to add this extra space for items which do not fit in with the main flow of the R.a.d archive.