History Of Cool: The Skateboard

I used to skate. OK, I used to try to skate. All the way through my teenage years you could hear me most evenings after school outside my parent’s semidetached, the steady skull-boring racket of a young man going up and down the uneven tarmac street (seemingly ad infinitum) on an object made from plywood and four small plastic wheels.

I was part of the fourth or fifth generation of delinquents and wannabe skate kids that got into the “sport,” mainly because of its associations with rebelliousness and youthful counterculture. Although the earliest skaters would “surf” sidewalks and empty swimming pools, the generation of skate rats of which I was part had ambitions that went beyond the curbs and potholes of our local car parks. Our teenage dreams were to surf the giant wooden waves and ramps found in skate parks and old warehouses that were popping up all over Britain in the late Eighties and Nineties… read more >