A taste of the excitement, anarchy and creativity of the early UK skateboarding scene, taken from Neil Macdonald‘s new book Elswhere: The Story of UK Skateboarding 1987–2002. Plus: meet Neil at the Idler Festival – see below

One of the biggest wake-up calls was in ’87, when us older generation used to meet each other at Southbank at one o’clock in the afternoon. This American skate magazine called me up and said they wanted to do some stuff with me at Southbank, and they asked me to be there for nine o’clock in the morning. I arrived at ten o’clock, thinking it was going to be dead, but there must have been 200 skaters there.

I’m looking round and thinking that six months ago there was 15 people there, and now there’s a couple of hundred at ten o’clock in the morning. I was just watching them pushing around, rolling in and rolling out, trying ollies and falling and trying again. Not even carving and working the banks, it was all basics.

It was all new to them. No lines or nothing like that. That’s the first wake-up call I got of, ‘This is it, it’s started.’ If that was going on at ten o’clock in the morning there, what else is going on around the country?

Then that was it, it completely went out of control. A whole new generation arrived overnight. You thought, ‘Wow, how did we get here?’
Shane O’Brien

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SLAM CITY SKATES
Tom Hodgkinson

My mum just said, ‘Look, you’ve got four weeks to get out and get a job’. She had a flat in Ladbroke Grove at the time, and I’d always wanted to work at Rough Trade, so I just walked in and applied, and they rang back and said no, but that they’d got me a job at the skateboarding shop. So I was thrown into that world.

They didn’t want someone who was too involved in the skateboarding scene because all the young kids would have loved to have worked there, but they were too close to their friends and they would flow them free stickers and stuff like that.

It was good because all my mates – all the posh Oxbridge-y people – all became great friends with Ged, Gavin Hills, Vernon and even some of the boys, like Will Bankhead – there were some real characters among the 15-year-olds – and they all took the piss out of me non-stop. I was shit at skateboarding, but luckily Gavin was also shit at skateboarding, so we formed the Crap Crew and went around with a gang of the older ones so I didn’t feel so intimidated at skateparks.

For me it was incredibly inspiring, and it helped sow the seeds of doing the Idler magazine because everyone in there was so entrepreneurial and it opened my eyes to a world where you didn’t have to have a full-time job, in a sense. I mean, Gavin was never going to have a job. Or Ged. They’re completely unsuited to the nine-to-five, but they were doing amazing things and even then I thought about how they didn’t even have to work at Slam.

It’s such a brilliant scene in skateboarding. All these brilliant, talented, 15 and 16-year-olds doing their own thing. This anarchist philosophy and anti-wage-slave ideas. It was a huge inspiration to see this way of life, where you lived by your wits – lived by your creativity – rather than get a job.

There was a definite feeling of being quite cool and being at the centre of things. I was the posh one, but it was a very middle-class scene. Most of them were actually very, very middle-class, and their parents were architects, and they lived in Camden, and they’re arty people but they’re London-y and quite street-y.

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Ged Wells

I moved to London after meeting Gav Hills at the Prague Euros, and collaborating with Paul Browne’s Sketchy zine. So I dossed at their places a bit, worked more at RAD and kept making Insane with my mum on the Island. RAD had given Insane quite a lot of exposure so sales were good.

I was approached by the then Slam / Rough Trade partners, and they wanted to start a wholesale operation and thought Insane would be a good starting position.

I signed a piece-of-paper contract, and it was the same contract that The Smiths and other bands had signed with Rough Trade in the early ’80s.

From the outset, my mum and I still produced Insane from the Island, so Slam stocked products like Jim Jams, then as the Slam operation kicked in, we transitioned everything.

Insane was very lucky because of my friends network. Tom Hodgkinson, Gav Hills and Cynthia Rose all helped tremendously in gaining Insane a wider profile in the Guardian, Observer, The Face, etcetera. So once my partnership with Slam geared up with products in the Covent Garden store, things grew very quickly.

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Gareth Skewis

To me, what Ged Wells was doing with Insane was as important as Stüssy. Shawn Stüssy and Paul Mittleman were all aware of it. Things like Insane and Anarchic Adjustment, and Poizone, and Fergus Purcell, were this real avant-garde, forward-thinking thing. It was all on this same wavelength and it was all really important.

The above are extracts from Elsewhere: The Story of UK Skateboarding 1987–2002 (Batsford, £50) by Neil Macdonald.

Buy a copy from bookshop.org here.

Or buy a copy from Blackwell’s here.

SKATEBOARDING IN THE UK
AT THE IDLER FESTIVAL

Neil Macdonald will be appearing at the Idler Festival on Friday 10 July. He’ll be joined by fellow eminent skateboarder, Professor Iain Borden, and former skateboard shop worker, Tom Hodgkinson, for a dive into how the skateboarding scene shaped British culture.

The Idler Festival runs from Friday 10 to Sunday 12 July at Fenton House and Gardens in Hampstead, London NW3.

See who else is performing and buy tickets with our Festival poster here. Click on the performer’s name for details.

See you there!

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