When We Was Rad:
Skateboard History from UK Vintage Magazine

Category: Issue 81 November 1989

  • 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…

  • 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.

  • Etnies Shoes Competition, 1989

    You could win a pair of Natas shoes in this competition, and I’ve no doubt that everyone who entered stood a very good chance. To enter you had to design a pair of shoes. Competitions which involved serious work like that only ever got a small number of entries, so those who took the trouble…

  • Encyclopaedia of Skateboarding: F, 1989 Style, continued

    The Encyclopaedia sometimes provided an opportunity to run some much older pictures, such as these. Jeremy Skelton is shown skating the pool in the West Midlands Safari Park in about 1980, while the picture of Stacy Peralta is from a demo for Blue Peter (I think) at Putney skatepark in 1978. The Blue Tile full-pipe…

  • Encyclopaedia of Skateboarding: F, 1989 Style

    As the introduction makes clear, the hope was that people would add to this information, or correct it. But in the days of one-way media very few took up the offer. So the R.a.D Encylopaedia limped along as mostly one person’s view on the skateboard world. Captions: Farnborough ramp overview with some ex-local getting in…

  • Ride out of the Sun: Wath-Upon-Dearne BMX Street

    This was a street competition before they became serious. Only one the pictures on this page involved riding anything. Which was as it should be. Other occurrences are Wayne Ryder’s bike-less window to window transfer, Mad John’s amazing run wearing a foam mattress as a poncho and still negotiating the obstacles (he scored 10,000 but…

  • 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…

  • BMX Abubacca from Wath-upon-Dearne 1989 style

    I wish we had run more pictures full page, but space was always a problem. Although I hated big competions, I loved events like this. Caption: Clive Gosling, Abubacca on a BMX. Imaginary boundaries crumble

  • BMX Street Competition in Wath-upon-Dearne

    David Slade’s report on this BMX street competition is a great insight into how it all was before big events had taken hold. This was about as rooty as it gets. Such things still happen now, but maybe they are the exception, not the rule. This is how it was. A good read, even if…

  • Martin Wager Intro

    Botheration! The text for this Intro doesn’t seem to be on the backup disc, so all we have is the scan of the page. If it turns up later, I’ll add it.