Frost with a Courthouse history vid
(sad they cut Kareem’s 20 Shot line, but)
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Southbank construction pics from 1963 - 68, undercroft taking shape on first slide
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Was feeling a bit shit today, needed to get out the flat and away from this endless job search and get some motivation. I checked out an exhibition that’s on at RIBA and saw this photo of the Tavy Bridge Thamesmead development, taken in the 1960s, showing what looks like skateable concrete banks.
Were they ever skated?
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Wow that loooks sick to skate .
Got to love those times thinking, let’s whack a huge slab of angled concrete down as a play space for kids . What could possibly go wrong. Ha!
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Look similar to the Forrest Fields bowls in Notts
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That’s Hyson Green bowls in Nottingham…
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Ok interesting. Maybe it was mislabelled.
I did wonder as I couldn’t find any other similar images from the Thamesmead development and the tower in the background didn’t match
I think they were still being skated around the time I started but were demolished not long after. I never made it there but they were the stuff of Notts legend…
Pretty sure they were still listed in RAD’s skate spot list for years after demolition, along with a little warning about not going there alone (not the nicest/safest area).
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Yes they were deffo skated.
Felix has told me stories of skating there when he was a kid
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Looks like I’ve mentally embellished that listing over the years…
I’ve only ever know it to be a big Asda. But I did hear they had some pretty heavy riots there in the 80s
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It’s like any deprived inner-city area, it has issues but also a lot of vibrancy. Love this painting of May Day in Hyson Green from 1978 by Paul Waplington:
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Lots of cool space age French brutalist architecture being skated in this, if you can stand the shitty filming…
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Why oh why did they sway from sticking to the Brutalist!
I mean, its not the end of the world - and its only a handful of clips - but if you are going to have a theme…stick to it.
Diverting defeats the theme idea.
That said…so, so many amazing looking spots.
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I dunno, all the clips seemed to be filmed at a spot which either featured some imposing modern architecture or used street-level topography in a novel way. It captured the ethos of brutalism nicely even if not all of the examples were strictly brutalist.
Someone should do this for Britain before most of these buildings and their respective spots disappear.
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@buildafire posted a link to this coffee table gem in the sea defences skate spot thread -
Aside from being fascinating from a historic relic / precursor to radar perspective, these acoustic mirrors are also rideable. I can’t imagine anyone’s skated them, (although I could be wrong), so apologies for slight tangent from the thread title and the BMX links but I thought they might be of interest to someone.
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Yeah, I’ve been there and skated them. They are kinda too big to do much on.
However, there was (it’s knackered now…) a smaller one which was good to skate about 20 years ago in Hythe.
Chroliver had a contents page of Kingpin doing the kickflip fakie from this clip in there:
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Brilliant footage, I guess that one will be severely weather-deteriorated by now
There’s a much smaller one in Southwick, Sunderland but not skateable, more popular as a ‘bag of cans’ spot
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Was this place in The Prodigy Invaders Must Die video? I think it was
