A tale of Fenlands answer to the Bones Brigade - skateboarding in Wisbech, UK in the late 80's and early 90's
I remember a time when if me and my skateboarding mates spotted another skateboarder in the street we would shout out "skater!!" and run or skate over to them as if they were a long lost relative. They didn't have to be carrying a skateboard, or even wearing skaters clothes (although at that time only skaters dressed as skaters, much to the ridicule of our chino and stripy shirt wearing contemporaries), you could usually spot a skater by the "ollie hole" in their trainers, or by the way they were checking out kerbs and banks (that's banks as in concrete slopes, if a skater came up to you and asked if you knew of any good banks in the area you didn't direct them to Natwest) as they walked along.
This was the late eighties in a small UK fenland town called Wisbech, and meeting other skaters was a revelation. Wisbech was a small town, completely flat, no skate facilities and isolated physically and culturally from the rest of the country. The stereotypical image of country bumpkins fighting in the street on a saturday afternoon after too much cider and boy racers hanging around the "multi-storey" (it had two storeys) sets the scene here.
There was however one cultural lifeline to the outside world in the form of a residential art college - what little alternative culture existed in this small town was usually seeded by pre-university art students coming into town from other parts of the country. When we were about 14, me and a childhood buddy of mine watched a couple of students skating in a covered area under the college library one rainy afternoon. They were skating round ollieing, grinding kerbs and doing that forgotten favourite trick of mine, the boneless. They dressed kind of weird too - floppy hair, dreads, huge baggy t-shirts, army trousers? Despite this bizarre dress sense we knew that we were onto something.
As kids we used to have tiny 70's boards and could already tic tac around but knew that we needed get ourselves some "proper" full size wooden boards which we soon procured. We propped an old wooden sign against a wall in a car park and would spend the evenings doing kickturns and attempting to master the ollie and the boneless. It turned out our new boards weren't really up to the job - mine snapped and my mates just seemed to disintegrate after a couple of weeks. It took a while to get hold of decent boards - they certainly weren't sold in Wisbech, and they didn't come cheap. Even then we were looking at not much change from £100 for a full set-up. Luckily we inherited cast-off boards from the students - usually worn right down with no tail or nose (not that boards had noses in the first place at that time). We even used to get hand-me-down vans and converse allstars which were like gold dust despite having to repair them with gaffertape and bits of bike inner tube to make them wearable. We used to idolise the student skaters and hang around and skate with them, much to their thinly masked public embarrassment.
By some freak of like-mindedness we started bumping into other skaters our age. I say like-mindedness because there was zero TV coverage of the growing sub culture of street skating, the internet didn't exist then, and skateboard magazines weren't sold in the Wisbech branch of WHSmiths. We soon learned that the only way to connect with our new found culture was to get on the bus at the weekend and visit nearby Cambridge and go and hang around Billys Skate shop and skate the roof garden of the Lion Yard shopping centre with the locals. We also discovered a community of skaters in nearby villiage Long Sutton - fueled by their proximity to an importer of skate gear on an industrial estate in Spalding, the owner of which had a 6ft ramp in his garden. We also procured some of the early Powell Peralta skate videos and through those we got a taste for the style, music and clothes of skating on the other side of the atlantic.
We used to copy every detail of what we saw in those skate videos - painting graffiti with Tippex onto the grip tape of our boards and our genuine dutch army-surplus combat trousers, taping the soundtracks of the videos straight from the TV (the CLICK!!! GRIIIND!!! SCCRRRRR!!! YEAH!!! noises in the background just used to add to the adrenaline when you skated listening to it on a walkman). The culture of being a skater was just as important as actually skating to some of us, but the buzz of skating in a group, spurring each other on and competing to get better and better was proving addictive to all of us. At that time I used to feel physically sick with excitement just knowing that I was going to go skating later in the day.
Our continually growing skate crew, The "Disciples of Sketch" - Fenlands answer to the Bones Brigade would go on frenzied street skating sessions, terrorizing pedestrians who would rather dive in front of a bus than be skated past by a load of scruffy freaks. The tolerance of the towns elders and betters grew thin - we were getting "busted" on a regular basis (i.e. asked to move on by supermarket deputy managers, responded to maturely by our taunts of "SKATEBOARDING IS NOT A CRIME!!").
Things got bad when my grandad phoned my parents and accused me of nearly running him over in the market place. They got worse when, whilst attempting a frontside ollie disaster on a bank at the old market, somehow managed to inadvertently shunt my board (Powell Peralta Steve Caballero model) into the side of a passing mini, nearly decapitating a motorcyclist in the process. Falling off a skateboard in a certain manner can sometimes cause your full weight, all your potential energy and some extra phantom force to project your board into the air at an incredible velocity, usually in the direction it was travelling before you lost balance. This is known as a "zoomer" and can cause huge damage to the faces of spectators and passers by. In this case it caused about £100 worth of damage to the mini and even though I gave the car driver a false name and address (me? -i'm Steve Caballero, pro skateboarder - I don't live round here), they tracked me down (by ringing up my school and asking after skateboarders with miskempt hair), resulting in a trip to the local police station much to the horror of my parents who were convinced this meant I was now destined for a descent into a life of vandalism and petty crime.
We made efforts to find somewhere to skate without being hassled by the establishment, these ranged from the illegitimate (derelict buildings) to the semi-legitimate (skating behind a community centre, pretending we were allowed to be there). The community centre payed off when an outdoor sports organisation took us under their wing and helped us get some cash and a site to build a mini ramp. The resulting 4ft miniramp was a revelation and gave us somewhere to focus our abundant skating energy without bothering the general public for one long glorious summer.
That summer also included a legendary (amongst Wisbech skaters) week long road trip down to cornwall, where we toured round the old skool skateparks, and regularly skated a 6ft ramp on Fistral beach car park which had been built for demo purposes for the World Surf championships being held that week. I'm not sure we were supposed to be skating it and we kept snaking the pros such as Mark Abrook. In the evenings we would skate a 2 mile downhill from a campsite above Newquay ending up in street sessions with the Newquay locals and surfer/skaters from across the globe in town for the championships until late in the night.
All good things come have to come to an end. As we got older many of the skaters became more distracted by sex, drugs and rock 'n' roll. The ramp became a place to hang out and party in the evenings, it was more popular than ever, but less and less skating was occuring. One night some of the skaters got really wasted and started pulling down the community centre fence to put on the bonfire. The next morning we turned up at the ramp to find the very same person who helped us get the ramp in the first place dismantling it and adding it to the bonfire. We weren't welcome anymore. Despite occasional attempts to get a new ramp built, we had bitten the hand that fed us and the ramp site became a go kart track.
As some us of started driving we went further afield and would skate at the Fakenham Bowl, Stamford skatepark and full pipe, Market Harborough skatepark, street skating in London at the legendary Shell 7 Steps and South Bank. Not having direct access to parks and ramps holds you back a bit, but has the advantage of making you skate like a madman when you do get to go on one. We would skate all day, despite injuries and would be skating so hard that we were blinded by our own sweat - we would then be on a real high all the way home and for days after.
As time went on we split off into smaller groups - some became street only, some ramp only, some just hung around and got wasted. There was rivalry going on and the scene had lost its momentum. It gradually started to fall apart at the end of the summer of '92
Some of us got girlfriends, some of us went to uni, some of us went down the hopeless case route, one person went off to to San Francisco to chase the skateboarding dream and one died in a car crash. Our generation of fenland skaters faded into skater non existence. I'm still in touch with some of them, although we are now distributed round the country. One or two still skate regularly, I just skate occasionally to the shop, although one or two of the old crew are now talking about hooking up for a skate soon, despite the ridicule of our girlfriends and wives....
written by Rick Hurst, Jan 2004
This was the late eighties in a small UK fenland town called Wisbech, and meeting other skaters was a revelation. Wisbech was a small town, completely flat, no skate facilities and isolated physically and culturally from the rest of the country. The stereotypical image of country bumpkins fighting in the street on a saturday afternoon after too much cider and boy racers hanging around the "multi-storey" (it had two storeys) sets the scene here.
There was however one cultural lifeline to the outside world in the form of a residential art college - what little alternative culture existed in this small town was usually seeded by pre-university art students coming into town from other parts of the country. When we were about 14, me and a childhood buddy of mine watched a couple of students skating in a covered area under the college library one rainy afternoon. They were skating round ollieing, grinding kerbs and doing that forgotten favourite trick of mine, the boneless. They dressed kind of weird too - floppy hair, dreads, huge baggy t-shirts, army trousers? Despite this bizarre dress sense we knew that we were onto something.
As kids we used to have tiny 70's boards and could already tic tac around but knew that we needed get ourselves some "proper" full size wooden boards which we soon procured. We propped an old wooden sign against a wall in a car park and would spend the evenings doing kickturns and attempting to master the ollie and the boneless. It turned out our new boards weren't really up to the job - mine snapped and my mates just seemed to disintegrate after a couple of weeks. It took a while to get hold of decent boards - they certainly weren't sold in Wisbech, and they didn't come cheap. Even then we were looking at not much change from £100 for a full set-up. Luckily we inherited cast-off boards from the students - usually worn right down with no tail or nose (not that boards had noses in the first place at that time). We even used to get hand-me-down vans and converse allstars which were like gold dust despite having to repair them with gaffertape and bits of bike inner tube to make them wearable. We used to idolise the student skaters and hang around and skate with them, much to their thinly masked public embarrassment.
By some freak of like-mindedness we started bumping into other skaters our age. I say like-mindedness because there was zero TV coverage of the growing sub culture of street skating, the internet didn't exist then, and skateboard magazines weren't sold in the Wisbech branch of WHSmiths. We soon learned that the only way to connect with our new found culture was to get on the bus at the weekend and visit nearby Cambridge and go and hang around Billys Skate shop and skate the roof garden of the Lion Yard shopping centre with the locals. We also discovered a community of skaters in nearby villiage Long Sutton - fueled by their proximity to an importer of skate gear on an industrial estate in Spalding, the owner of which had a 6ft ramp in his garden. We also procured some of the early Powell Peralta skate videos and through those we got a taste for the style, music and clothes of skating on the other side of the atlantic.
We used to copy every detail of what we saw in those skate videos - painting graffiti with Tippex onto the grip tape of our boards and our genuine dutch army-surplus combat trousers, taping the soundtracks of the videos straight from the TV (the CLICK!!! GRIIIND!!! SCCRRRRR!!! YEAH!!! noises in the background just used to add to the adrenaline when you skated listening to it on a walkman). The culture of being a skater was just as important as actually skating to some of us, but the buzz of skating in a group, spurring each other on and competing to get better and better was proving addictive to all of us. At that time I used to feel physically sick with excitement just knowing that I was going to go skating later in the day.
Our continually growing skate crew, The "Disciples of Sketch" - Fenlands answer to the Bones Brigade would go on frenzied street skating sessions, terrorizing pedestrians who would rather dive in front of a bus than be skated past by a load of scruffy freaks. The tolerance of the towns elders and betters grew thin - we were getting "busted" on a regular basis (i.e. asked to move on by supermarket deputy managers, responded to maturely by our taunts of "SKATEBOARDING IS NOT A CRIME!!").
Things got bad when my grandad phoned my parents and accused me of nearly running him over in the market place. They got worse when, whilst attempting a frontside ollie disaster on a bank at the old market, somehow managed to inadvertently shunt my board (Powell Peralta Steve Caballero model) into the side of a passing mini, nearly decapitating a motorcyclist in the process. Falling off a skateboard in a certain manner can sometimes cause your full weight, all your potential energy and some extra phantom force to project your board into the air at an incredible velocity, usually in the direction it was travelling before you lost balance. This is known as a "zoomer" and can cause huge damage to the faces of spectators and passers by. In this case it caused about £100 worth of damage to the mini and even though I gave the car driver a false name and address (me? -i'm Steve Caballero, pro skateboarder - I don't live round here), they tracked me down (by ringing up my school and asking after skateboarders with miskempt hair), resulting in a trip to the local police station much to the horror of my parents who were convinced this meant I was now destined for a descent into a life of vandalism and petty crime.
We made efforts to find somewhere to skate without being hassled by the establishment, these ranged from the illegitimate (derelict buildings) to the semi-legitimate (skating behind a community centre, pretending we were allowed to be there). The community centre payed off when an outdoor sports organisation took us under their wing and helped us get some cash and a site to build a mini ramp. The resulting 4ft miniramp was a revelation and gave us somewhere to focus our abundant skating energy without bothering the general public for one long glorious summer.
That summer also included a legendary (amongst Wisbech skaters) week long road trip down to cornwall, where we toured round the old skool skateparks, and regularly skated a 6ft ramp on Fistral beach car park which had been built for demo purposes for the World Surf championships being held that week. I'm not sure we were supposed to be skating it and we kept snaking the pros such as Mark Abrook. In the evenings we would skate a 2 mile downhill from a campsite above Newquay ending up in street sessions with the Newquay locals and surfer/skaters from across the globe in town for the championships until late in the night.
All good things come have to come to an end. As we got older many of the skaters became more distracted by sex, drugs and rock 'n' roll. The ramp became a place to hang out and party in the evenings, it was more popular than ever, but less and less skating was occuring. One night some of the skaters got really wasted and started pulling down the community centre fence to put on the bonfire. The next morning we turned up at the ramp to find the very same person who helped us get the ramp in the first place dismantling it and adding it to the bonfire. We weren't welcome anymore. Despite occasional attempts to get a new ramp built, we had bitten the hand that fed us and the ramp site became a go kart track.
As some us of started driving we went further afield and would skate at the Fakenham Bowl, Stamford skatepark and full pipe, Market Harborough skatepark, street skating in London at the legendary Shell 7 Steps and South Bank. Not having direct access to parks and ramps holds you back a bit, but has the advantage of making you skate like a madman when you do get to go on one. We would skate all day, despite injuries and would be skating so hard that we were blinded by our own sweat - we would then be on a real high all the way home and for days after.
As time went on we split off into smaller groups - some became street only, some ramp only, some just hung around and got wasted. There was rivalry going on and the scene had lost its momentum. It gradually started to fall apart at the end of the summer of '92
Some of us got girlfriends, some of us went to uni, some of us went down the hopeless case route, one person went off to to San Francisco to chase the skateboarding dream and one died in a car crash. Our generation of fenland skaters faded into skater non existence. I'm still in touch with some of them, although we are now distributed round the country. One or two still skate regularly, I just skate occasionally to the shop, although one or two of the old crew are now talking about hooking up for a skate soon, despite the ridicule of our girlfriends and wives....
written by Rick Hurst, Jan 2004
