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Death Box Skateboards advert from December 1989
Runnning a double-page spread advert must have been a huge investment for Jeremy Fox at this point. Ultimately it all came good for him with Flip, but that was a long time in the future. The skaters featured are Pete Dossett on the left and Wurzel on the right. The Wurzel picture was taken at…
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Santa Cruz Decks Advert from 1989 Featuring Mike Prosenko
Look at all these classic board shapes (and weep, or smile, depending on your skate generation). This is an excellent set of graphics as well, providing yet another wonderful insight into another era. At the time I paid far less attention to the adverts than most readers. Looking back, they seem to distil the essence…
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Slam City Skates Advert featuring Rob Dukes
Rob Dukes is the skater featured in this Slam City Skates advert. I’m not quite sure where it was taken, but I would guess at Stockwell or maybe Kennington.
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Pacer Raider Skateboard Trucks Advert
Pacer have an interesting place in the history of skateboarding in the UK. Steve Constable was one of the first people to import skateboards into Britain in time for the boom of the nineteen seventies. I think the “Shark” boards were his. The company was called “Gecko” and distributed G & S, ACS and Powell…
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Skate shop adverts from international shop, hard-core shop and roller skate…
Historians of skateboard advertising may find this an interesting page. This is how things were before so much moved on line. Rodolfo’s in Amsterdam advertised in a UK Skateboard magazine partly to reach an international market, but also (I think) to reach their domestic market at a time when there was no local magazine available…
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Two classic UK skateboard shops: Billys and Off Beat
This Billy’s Boards advert announces the move of their shop to Chesterton Road in Cambridge. Townsends still have that shop (in 2006) but seem to be only selling bikes there. The Billy’s skate shop is now elsewhere, but seems to be going strong. Off Beat Sportz are another of those shops who have been going…
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Skate Attack and Middlemore’s BMX Adverts November 1989
What a nightmare page: two not-really-core skateboard shops and a subscription advert. I wonder what Middlemore’s thought they were getting into with this BMX advert? Skate Attack in London’s Kentish Town were very serious about rollerskates but I don’t think skateboards were so much their thing. As to the subscription advert — Like it says:…
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Local Skateboard Shop Adverts November 1989
There’s bigger selection of small UK skateboard shops here than normal. November 1989 would have been a peak month for the skateboard business in Britain. Muddy Fox and Matchrite jokes are the odd ones out, sitting alongside Wheels Unlimited from Weymouth, Transition Skates from Grimsby, Dave Friar Surf Shop in Swansea, Freebird from Bideford, Round…
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Vision Streetwear Advert November 1989
Vision Streetwear were the shoes which defined one brief era in British skate fashion. They never really crossed-over into the fashion mainstream here and so stayed an identifying brand for skaters and BMXers. In the USA things were different, I believe: they started selling in mainstream shops and provided an early prototype for the whole…
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Skater Owned Shops Adverts November 1989
This is an interesting example of the original Skater-Owned-Shops group getting together to buy a page of colour advertising, I think. Or maybe it was a Billy Brown idea to create a special page for them. SS20 and Clan were in for the long haul, representing Glasgow and Oxford. Stampys in Birmingham and Off the…