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Skateboard Mail Order: Everything at Your Leisure: December 1989
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.
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Shiny buildings and dodgy plywood in Telford
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…
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The raw materials of skateboarding: banks and bits of ply
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…
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Pacer Complete Skateboards, December 1989
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.
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Melanchollie Ben Wheeler
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Pictures of Everyman Skating in Everytown. It could be Your Town. It could be You.
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.…
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Vision Streetwear Shoes Advert December 1989
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.
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Grantham Skateboard Park in a Pool: 1989
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…
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Cyrils Boardwalkers and Freestyle Ramps Adverts
I’ve nothing to say about these two adverts. There’s honesty for you.
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New minis in Bath and Leamington, the beginning of a Legend
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…