I remember visiting my brother @navitronic with my dad. He put a 411 on to watch I think from memory. Then down the side of the house he rode his board whilst I stood between his legs. Then after then I had a variety of cheap boards. I had one from Argos with aliens on it thinking it was a AWS board.
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Mate convinced me to get a board because he didn’t wanna buy one by himself. Got a Maui and sons from urban chaos in Bromley, around the corner.
If you follow the map down to the bottom of the road you can see a long mellow bike assist. Rail going up the long stairs where tom Knox did a bigspin to fakie 5050 in an Atlantic drift or something fairly recently
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First sighting of a skateboarder - Westward Ho! esplanade 1976. My lasting impression was that he was moving without moving. Intrigued and stoked in equal measure.
First skate related injury - bumboarding hillbomb on friend’s homemade roller-skate and plywood setup to legs akimbo road sign collision, Hampshire 1977. Got up and ran home as I didn’t know what else to do.
First skatepark visited - Skate City, London, 1977. Borrowed board, (Godfather’s son’s Benji board with blue Krypts and Bennett’s, which I have since acquired).
First place skated - Got there in the end… I finally got a set up of my own, G&S Stacy Peralta Warptail, (that I meant to always keep but somehow it went missing at an undetermined point in time around the mid 80’s never to be seen again), and sessioned my parents super long, windy and downhill driveway for a good while on my own, Isle of Wight, 1978. I Google Maps’d it a while back and the house is no more. Some developers ‘dozed what was a beautiful Victorian seaside villa and built some ‘contemporary luxury apartments’, the absolute Brians.
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this little patch on my mates street was probably the very first place i’d rode a skateboard, that’s dogshit alley right there
this bit of kerb in front of my parents
then when we’d learnt to at least skate around a bit it was this village skatepark everyday in the summer holiday of 2002 i believe 
This is in a town called George in South Africa - about 400kms up the east coast from Cape Town. I was born in this town (and this was my first house until I was 13) when my family moved back to CT (I was the only one not born there). It’s a surfy town and my two older brothers had adopted surfing, skating and thrash metal (very 1988) so we used to blast Metallica and bomb our driveway (steeper than it looks here). There used to be a little bank on the left hand side that we used to ‘surf’ up. As you can see, the road ends and goes straight into a forest after the neighbour - so that meant no traffic and loads of jump ramps.
fun fact: this region (Garden Route) has the second mildest climate in the world - only Hawaii has more chilled weather.
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That’s a sick one! I don’t think of Hawaii having a mild climate…never been there but I think of mild as being 15 degrees and overcast haha! Anything over 20 degrees is too hot for me.
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my parents live on a hill in West London and me and my mate who lived next door used to go down it sitting on our plastic fishboards
one time a group of skaters came by dragging a plastic pvc sheet they were going to build a ramp with. they taught us how to “catamaran” where you put two boards parallel then sit on your board with your feet on the other board. bombed some pretty decent Ealing hills doing that. i think i was about 7
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What did you skate there? Just the pavement or the road?
Kerb on the left was waxed to buggery, maybe see the wear a little from the cut to the drain. Used the driveway across the road as a flat bank too.
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Kerb. Was at bottom of my road which was a slight hill. There’s a kerb cut volcano a bit further up, but that was the ‘advanced’ area of the road
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Haha sick! My brother lives near there will have to pay it a visit when I write my Trawler-esque book.
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