When We Was Rad:
Skateboard History from UK Vintage Magazine

Category: Issue 96 May 1991

  • Sequence: Jason Maldini Ollie Japan Air

    Having said last week that I didn’t really like the sequences, I have to eat my words. I like the style of this a lot. Jason Maldini was another South Bank stalwart who probably should have got more coverage than he did. Vernon took the pictures.

  • Sequences: 180 Ollie to Nose and Frontside Bench Slide to Revert

    Simon Evans and Tony Luckhurst at Watlington and South Bank. At this point we’re still burning real film for sequences. The video fuzziness was yet to come. The challenge of showing the trick was always hard enough — it looks like at this point we’d given up trying to describe them in words! I think…

  • Rodolfos, Method Air and Skate City Adverts

    This was still a long way before the era of skateboard shops in prime locations. At this point it was still a few dedicated pioneers who kept us all supplied. They supplied much more than just equipment: shops were the real focal point for many local scenes in a time when ramps and parks were…

  • Warren Brown Intro 1991

    Good solid skating. 1991 was a wonderful time, when street skating really was starting to come together. Although my vision of skateboarding was formed on ramps and skateparks in the dark ages, the street explosion of the early nineties was a wonderful time for me. Years skating: 2 years Where from: Hackney Skate with: Curtis…

  • Winstan Whitter Intro

    Winstan Whitter went on to make the best film on British skateboarding I have ever seen. Here he is in an Intro from 1991. The year highlights one of the most impressive aspects of his work: Rollin Through the Decades gets the spirit of the earlier decades exactly right even though they are before Winstan’s…

  • Introducing Jagger: Birmingham Skate Legend

    Why do I feel odd writing about this page in the knowledge that Jagger reads (and contributes to) this blog? It wouldn’t have seemed odd publishing the page itself in the first place and of course we assumed that he would read it. I think this is another example of the way the nature of…

  • Strange Small Adverts

    I glazed over when I saw this kind of thing back then. Now I wonder about it. Even here there’s stuff going on: two skateboard shops in Banbury? Spice of Life in Southend? What’s the story behind this kind of thing?

  • The Wall: social networking and user-created content from 1991

    From an age before e-Bay, Myspace and Facebook… Here we have social networking and user-created content, 1991 style. The Wall was a far from perfect market-place, notorious for inflated ideas of what a worn-out deck might be worth. It was also one part of the magazine where the voice of the readers could be heard.…

  • Birmingham: concrete city, bye bye

    The picture at the bottom right has a poignant grimness to it. That really does sum up the idea of skaters making use of the spaces that everyone else would shun. It may look oppressive but we really had a great day there. So much stuff. I have a great fondness for that picture. I…

  • Steps and bins: furniture for skaters to make the streets home

    I’ve just realised that the top pictures of Whizzer are a sequence. Apologies. I should have stitched the two pages together. Once again Egan is much in evidence. It’s not like these were all people who normally skated together: different groups from different parts of Birmingham were all sessioning the same place on this rare…