The Cotswolds is a lovely place to be, unless you’re between the ages of 7 and 70. For that age group, there is nothing. When I say nothing I mean there are tractors, cider, pigeons, Land Rovers, Honda Civics, straw, grass and curtains. But there is nothing else.
For a teenage skateboarder in the late 80s, this nothingness was a real challenge. Without mobile phones, internet or at first even videos and magazines, skateboarding was essentially a mythical activity. Half-rumoured, half-imagined. Rarely glimpsed, except by the lucky few, maybe every few months on Saturday morning TV, where wildly dressed hooligans leapt into the air without using their hands. We somehow learned to ollie through the quasi-memory of one of us who swore he’d seen a guy jump over a kerb on the telly. ‘He lifted the front up first’ was all he could remember.
So when the videos and magazines finally came, they only amplified our understanding that we were in the wrong place at the wrong time. We had no mean streets, no concrete, no marble, hardly even a kerb to speak of. Just mud-strewn tarmac and wind rush.
To look at Thrasher in this context was to witness life on another planet. Absolutely nothing about it had any relevance to the environment we skated in; we may as well have been canoeing on a ski-slope.
Until we found RAF Fairford. This large military installation was on the edge of town and bore serious aviation history. With a huge runway, it was where Concorde was tested and the preferred spot in Europe for the space shuttle to land.
It’s an American air base split in two by the main road: air-side and recreation-side. In the late 80s and early 90s you could simply stroll onto the recreation side of the base and do whatever you wanted. There was a bowling alley, hotel, accommodation, school, commissary and so on. All of it American. Completely different architecture, interiors, goods and services compared to the ancient wool town of Fairford with its medieval church and marketplace.
We’re talking about a complete US town transplanted into the middle of the English countryside. The roads were different, the pavements too. There were painted curbs (with a c) and, yes, there were fire hydrants.
So within a mile of the historic Cotswolds town you could somehow travel through time and space to modern California.
Can you imagine what a paradise this was to geographically challenged teenage skateboarders who - after excitedly rewatching pirated copies of Public Domain - would step out of their house and typically smell…manure?
The best spot was the loading bay of the commissary: two long sloping painted curbs, drops, steps, a steep bank all set on a huge concrete flat ground. Then there was the school with smooth flat and a long, gently twisting bank-to-fence 30 degrees at one end and 40 at the other. And the curbs, my god the curbs that went on forever, making any trick from the early Plan B videos seem technically possible. But we never touched the fire hydrants, they were too tall, and we were too small, and Natas was obviously an alien.
Every session ended at the bowling alley, ‘Skytanker Lanes’. We would celebrate the day’s flipping triumphs with exotic concoctions such as Mountain Dew, Dr Pepper and A&W Root Beer to wash down a serious military cheeseburger with real fries.
You’ve got to understand none of this stuff was available in shops or our homes at the time. It was all a wild cinematic fantasy that, by some miracle, we had real access to.
It made the pages of US magazines actually relevant and the tricks of US videos actually transferable.
After the Gulf War in 1990 the security on the gate began to tighten. We would have to pretend we had a booking at the bowling alley or a collection at the commissary in order to be allowed on. When the B-52s landed on one side of the base, we listened to Rock Lobster on the other.
Over the next few years, security continued to harden until one day we simply couldn’t enter the base any more, at least for any reason we could concoct.
Our access to this paradise was lost forever. But we had been there. We really had. I wish you had too.