When We Was Rad:
Skateboard History from UK Vintage Magazine

Category: Issue 96 May 1991

  • Moor Street Car Park Birmingham

    “Three hearty young lads give the Moor Street Car Park their very best.” I always thought that NCP should sponsor a “King of the Car Parks” series. But I doubt if they would have seen things the same way. In the grim damp cities of winter, car parks provided one of the few indoor places…

  • Homage to Hockney Skate Mag Advert

    Subscription adverts were always a weak spot in the magazine. They were more the publisher’s thing than ours. But we had to come up with some comment. This was my favourite one because it combined two things: the feel of a suburban room full of magazines, stickers and posters and another attempt to explore space…

  • Birmingham Days Gets Going

    Now we get down to some words, at last. In this case I can’t be quite sure who wrote them. Probably me, but I’m not quite sure. The theme of ‘space left over’ by the planners is one of my pet themes, but “you get the feeling that you’d be mugged by the environment before…

  • More Birmingham Skateboarding, 1991 style

    Jovial Jagger, Crucial Christian, Bustin Benny and… who? After all these years we’ve corrected the missing name-check for Egan on the last page, courtesy of Jagger. Who can help out with the skater featured top-right here, please?

  • Skateboarding in Birmingham, 1991

    These are the features which mattered most to me. My obsession was always with getting out into different places and covering different scenes. The roots of R.a.D magazine date back to when I was working in a skateboard mail order company and dealing with skaters scattered all over the UK — often in the remote…

  • Billy’s SK8 Shop Advert May 1991

    As I glance at these adverts I realise how little interest I had in the equipment, even though I was surrounded with it for most of my working life. Instead I find myself contemplating the technology which was used to produce pages like this: the effort which a shop would have had to put in…

  • Freestyle Skate Ramps, Back Street Skates Adverts and others 1991

    The odd one out here is the advert from the Advertising Standards Authority. These were used as fillers if the advertising space had not been sold to anyone. Every now and again we would find ourselves on the receiving end of their attention when someone got upset about an advert. The most bizarre example of…

  • Welcome Harry Hardcore

    This run of pages seems to be a real Gav fest. The much-hated Ricky Spangles, a.k.a Spangleski had finally been buried, probably as a result of reader pressure. And pressure closer from within the team as well, I suspect. So here we have “Harry Hardcore”, Gavin’s nod to all those who could tell (and the…

  • You are now the World’s Greatest Street Skater

    The story comes to an end. You get to tug Titus’ ponytail. You have won the 1991 Munster street competition. It’s all true… Actually, it’s not — it’s a dream. Tony Hawk won street as well as ramps that year. I’ve just read through this and noticed “(???check names???)” near the end. It made me…

  • Today You Must Practice and Practice Again

    “Who he?” they think… I feel really bad when faced with captions with no names. I can’t put a name to him, sorry (help?). The location looks like Fairfield Halls in Croydon. Interesting to note the coy: “f***ing”. We didn’t normally used asterisks. We didn’t normally use words which might have needed them (although the…