Francis Gooding: Diary

Francis Gooding

Skateboarders see the world in their own way. They have a unique appreciation for aspects of architecture that otherwise go unloved or overlooked, and their unorthodox investigations of the postwar built environment constitute the most detailed and intimate engagement with modern urbanism made by any social group. Who else has searched out and realised the potential of the least promising city-centre car park, the most barren postmodern plaza? Who else has found the beauty in seemingly pointless 1970s municipal red-brick angled banking or is as familiar with the material qualities of concrete, stone, brick, paving, their behaviour under varying conditions, their creative affordances? Any seasoned skateboarder could furnish you with an alternative guide to a city you think you know, picking out landmarks you’ve never noticed while casting a connoisseur’s eye over paving types, brickwork, benches, steps and every other idiosyncrasy of the urban landscape. There is a long history of skaters making informal guides for one another. During the late 1980s and early 1990s, R.A.D. magazine’s determinedly local section ‘Where?’ collated information provided by readers about any and every semi-skateable urban feature: a handrail, a set of stairs, a banked incline, a freestanding kerb.

This preoccupation with urban design came about because skaters are always looking for somewhere and something to skate. So it’s no surprise that skateboarders were, a full half-century ago, the first people to understand and find a use for the peculiar architectural oddity that lay beneath the Queen Elizabeth Hall and Hayward Gallery on the South Bank of the Thames. These buildings of the 1960s, which in combination with the previous decade’s Royal Festival Hall formed what came to be known as the Southbank Centre, were designed by a team including the architects Ron Herron, Warren Chalk and Dennis Crompton, later members of the avant-garde Archigram group. Their visionary sense of spaces and places in the future city was materialised in the brutalist concrete blocks, elevated platforms and mazy walkways of the Southbank Centre. The scheme also included an underworld of free space, organised around a deep and steeply banked arena, and an array of driveways, banks, walls and stairs. It was in effect a piece of freestyle architecture, intentionally conceived with no purpose in mind.

By the early 1970s, the first wave of skateboarders recognised that the smooth surfaces and inclines of the space beneath the Queen Elizabeth Hall – named the Undercroft by the original designers but known to skaters simply as ‘Southbank’ or ‘SB’ – were perfectly suited to their needs. They continued to find new ways of using it for decades afterwards. As skateboarding styles changed, and the pastime went through peaks and troughs of fashionability, Southbank remained in constant use.

In the late 1980s and early 1990s, the paucity and inaccessibility of dedicated skateparks and the rise of street skating involved skaters in a thorough exploration of their cities. In London, these were the days before Sunday trading and blanket redevelopment programmes; at the weekend, large parts of the city were completely empty. Everything was new, and we went about largely unhindered, from Waterloo to St Paul’s, Liverpool Street and deep into the Square Mile, looking for sets of stairs, marble blocks, kerbs, anything that might be skateable.

Skating in the centre of London had a certain outlaw mystique: we were treating the city as a playground, getting into spaces we weren’t really supposed to be in and doing stuff we weren’t really supposed to do, continually being moved on by the cops or running away from security guards. We occupied the city in a different way from everyone else: we had a different map and we saw the value in the places people didn’t go and the things they thought useless or didn’t even register. It made us feel like outsiders, and in a sense we were. The ‘hostile architecture’ of knobbed and spiked benches and walls is designed to ward off two kinds of people: skateboarders and the homeless.

Wherever we went, though, we would usually start or end at Southbank. It was always the centre of skateboarding in London and the Undercroft’s accidental perfection as a skate spot drew people from all over the world. Herron, Chalk, Crompton and the rest had invited the public to find a meaning and a use for their free abstractions in concrete. It was skateboarders who found one.

In the same way, skateboarders were the first and only people to have understood, in the sense of being able to see a use for, such baffling and unlovely spaces as San Francisco’s Embarcadero Plaza, the blocks and steps outside Barcelona’s Museu d’Art Contemporani (MACBA), the red-brick waves under the Brooklyn Bridge, and any number of other postmodern non-spaces and inter-spaces. Like Southbank, these locations are known to skaters around the world, and all have been remade or destroyed by the authorities that have jurisdiction over them, often specifically in order to prevent skateboarders from using them. The strange collection of blocks and ledges that made the old Embarcadero so attractive to skaters is now entirely gone; important sections of the MACBA complex have been removed and only recently an international petition had to be raised by skaters against further alterations; the Brooklyn Banks, recently restored to their original form and designated an official skate park, spent many years in disuse as the authorities repeatedly altered and blocked them to deter skaters. Skateboarders have always had to defend their culture, but they have also found themselves having to defend modern architecture and public space against redevelopment, enclosure and official vandalism.

As one of the first public architectural spaces in the world to be fully adopted by skateboarders (and to a lesser extent by rollerskaters and BMXers), Southbank was also one of the first locations where measures were taken to prevent skating. From the late 1980s onwards, when the first plans to redevelop the area between Waterloo Bridge and Hungerford Bridge were drawn up, councils and local institutions organised numerous campaigns to this end. The Southbank Centre was so determined to get rid of skateboarders that it was prepared to wreck its own material fabric to do it. Large sections of paving had already been taken up in the late 1980s, and in 1990, after the Corporation of London enacted a bylaw to prevent skateboarding ahead of the proposed redevelopment, the celebrated ‘bank-to-wall’ area was blocked off (it was later removed completely). In subsequent years access to the smaller banks was shut off with large metal barriers (skaters first learned to use them, then repeatedly tore them down; they were eventually removed), the overhead lighting was disabled, large stones were set into the ‘driveway’ (these are still there) and, perhaps most numbskulled of all, large furrows were jack-hammered directly into an expanse of paving. In 2003, almost the whole undercover area was simply closed off and the small banks and larger driveway destroyed; the new indoor space this created was used for storage. After that, the site was in limbo until 2013, when the Southbank Centre revealed its ‘Festival Wing’ redevelopment plan, which would finally solve the problem of the Undercroft by filling it with food and retail concessions. The backlash was immediate and powerful, and out of it came the Long Live Southbank campaign, whose efforts eventually resulted in the permanent preservation of the Undercroft for the use of skateboarders, in effect turning it into an official skatepark.

A small part of the storage area from the limbo years, a space which only exists because of the Southbank Centre’s decades-long determination to stop skateboarding, was used recently as the venue for an exhibition, Skate 50, that documented fifty years of skateboarding in the Undercroft. This is what it looks like when a large institution attempts to metabolise its own ignominious history. Skate 50 was, in one sense, a belated vindication of the skateboarders who used the Undercroft and were truly the Southbank’s most loyal constituency. In another, ineradicable sense, the exhibition was a humiliation for the Southbank Centre. We are after all not talking about the premises of a transnational bank or a firm of dead-eyed corporate lawyers. The Southbank is a national centre for the arts, housed in a major, visionary work of modernism – now Grade 2 listed – whose architects had created a novel public space intended to stimulate novel public uses. Yet the arts people smashed up their own building to stop people who loved it from enjoying it, and permanently ruined its most radical architectural feature to prevent them from using it as a place to develop, in public view, a new art form and cultural practice.

This bizarre campaign of self-destructive intervention by the Southbank Centre was periodically augmented by the persecution of skaters and photographers by security guards, who would, from time to time, devise ad hoc solutions to their problem; in one of their (temporarily) more successful ruses, large amounts of gravel were scattered through the space, making it impossible to skate. Actions such as these, carried out over many years, made clear the Southbank Centre’s disdain for skaters. Many people refused to collaborate with Skate 50, among them the veteran skate photographer Wig Worland, who explained that the Southbank Centre had been, in a practical, everyday sense, ‘the enemy’. The security guards’ regular attempts to prevent him taking photos amounted, in his view, to an anti-arts policy: ‘At the time it felt like harassment, and looking back, it feels like the deliberate prevention of the cultural documentation that the current exhibition seeks to celebrate.’

Better documentation and memorialisation of UK skateboarding history has recently come in the form of two handsome publications: Read and Destroy: Skateboarding through a British Lens ’78 to ’95 by Dan Adams (ACC Art Books, £45), which recovers the history of R.A.D.; and Elsewhere: The Story of UK Skateboarding 1987-2002 by Neil Macdonald (Batsford, £50), a detailed oral history of the British scene in its golden years. These are meticulously researched volumes, extensively illustrated and produced with the involvement of everyone who was anyone. By comparison, the Skate 50 exhibition was an impoverished affair. In the dark and windowless space at the south end of the Undercroft (old Southbank heads will know that it was once the run-up to the four-stair, and the precise location of the jack-hammered pavement), a variety of faux skate obstacles were arranged for people to sit on. On two large screens, a selection of short films about skateboarding at Southbank played on a half-hour loop, and on the irregular walls of the space there was a timeline. There were some large photos from various eras, including several by Tim Leighton-Boyce, one of the moving spirits behind British skateboarding, and some oral histories relayed through headphones from such figures as Stuart Maclure of the Long Live Southbank campaign.

The films were the major part of the show. As always with underground and unorthodox art and culture, where there is documentation it is made by the participants themselves, and the two central presentations here were both made by skaters who had a big role in recording the culture they were part of. Wheels of Time, produced by Winstan Whitter, is a short two-part film about skating at Southbank in the 1970s and 1980s; Dark Days in December, by Dan Magee, is a piece on skating in the 1990s. Magee’s piece is crafted around a lovely bit of insider knowledge. There was once a public payphone just next to the Undercroft, and in the days before mobile phones, skateboarders would call the number before heading down: the payphone would ring, a passing skater would pick up and the caller would ask who was there that day so the phone could be handed to a friend and arrangements made. The film’s set-up has two legends of UK skating in the 1990s and 2000s, Nick Jensen and Toby Shuall, both Southbank regulars, making a payphone call; the phone is picked up by a current Southbank skater, Twiggy, who gets Shuall and Jensen to talk about Southbank in the 1990s while we watch Magee’s footage from that time.

The impression – a correct one – given by these films is of a self-sustaining community, bound together across the decades by a shared experience of place and practice. It wouldn’t do to romanticise. Southbank could be cliquey, and outsiders or beginners could find the atmosphere created by regulars intimidating. It was a socially liminal place, occupied by socially liminal people. A skateboard is a pricey bit of kit, and sometimes there’d be attempts to rob the skaters. There was a large, semi-permanent encampment of homeless people in one of the walkways, long since blocked off. There were often drunks and junkies and crazy people hanging about. Sometimes, the skaters themselves were the doped up, drunk and crazy people. You mostly just ignored anything sketchy and got on with skating, but there was always a chance that something strange or chaotic might happen, and frequently it did.

The worst might happen, too. In the timeline on the wall at Skate 50, the entry for 1999 was dedicated to the death of Timothy ‘Timo’ Baxter, who was murdered on Hungerford Bridge in June that year. Timo was my oldest and closest childhood friend; we grew up skating together. Winstan Whitter photographed him at Southbank the day before he was killed. Timo’s murder, at a time when he had been working in a Central London skateshop and was a Southbank regular, is a trauma that remains only partly processed. The timeline mentioned the urban legend that broken skateboards are thrown onto the southernmost foundation platform of the Golden Jubilee Bridge – the so-called ‘skateboard graveyard’ – in his memory. I don’t know how true that was when people started throwing boards onto the platform, but I guess repetition has made it true now. I stopped skating after Timo’s death. I think I went out once more, but not to Southbank; just one final session a couple of weeks later at the white blocks next to Hammersmith flyover, with the legendary SB general Clive Daley and a few others. It wasn’t much fun, as I recall, and I couldn’t land anything worthwhile. After that I was done; my friend was dead and my heart wasn’t in it.

Today the Undercroft is an enclosure. Various blocks and ledges have been installed over the last ten years to act as permanent obstacles. The small banks have been remade, after a fashion; the railing that encircled the big banks has been removed and reconfigured as a barrier to public access. It is a sanctioned, fenced-off skatepark, the elegant grey-brown concrete of the banks, walls and pillars now hidden under colourful graffiti – always a sure sign, in the contemporary urban setting, of the dead hand of official sanction.

Misgivings aside, this is a happy ending. The Undercroft is sacred ground and should be retained for the use of the people who made it what it is. The exhibition, too small, too short, too hidden from view, was nonetheless a significant marker in time, and an enormous credit to the skaters, filmmakers and photographers involved. But it also underlined that Southbank is not what it was. In the years before the Southbank Centre finally managed to nobble it – even after the bank-to-wall was blocked, even after the barriers went up – the Undercroft was still a free, undetermined space. It wasn’t controllable, it wasn’t set aside, it wasn’t closed off to spectators and passers-by. It was a truly public place, and it had been found, claimed and occupied by skateboarders; in law it was the Southbank Centre’s property, but it also wasn’t anybody’s, and we definitely made it ours. There was no development on the South Bank back then: no shops, no restaurants, no tourists, no bars or pubs, no London Eye. The riverfront was quiet; at night it was a ghost town. And the Undercroft wasn’t just one place: it was part of a landscape of spots discovered and reimagined by skaters, a territory that stretched from the steps, rails and walls of the Shell Centre, through Jubilee Gardens to the ‘birdshit banks’ and the Gonz stairs beneath Hungerford Bridge, then to Southbank and beyond, towards Sea Containers House and a multitude of other hidden places, each with its own small mythology. We weren’t allowed to skate in any of these places, but we did. Most of what existed then is gone. Skaters couldn’t have saved it from enclosure and redevelopment, and they weren’t in a position to try. But the public status of the Southbank Centre meant they could and did save at least something of that place, even if today’s Undercroft is a tamed and uglified pastiche of its former self.

Any talk about the past inevitably makes old skateboarders nostalgic for tricks landed and tricks missed, spots skated, the witnessing of extraordinary feats by others; given half a chance any long-time Southbank skater will come off like Rutger Hauer at the end of Blade Runner (‘I’ve seen things you people wouldn’t believe … I watched Curtis McCann late backside bigspin the seven in the dark. Clive sticking switch tres every time. Simon Evans popping FS shuvs over the steps into the big banks wearing cut-off trousers and Adidas Gazelles …’). The freedom of Southbank made such memories possible; it was the Southbank Centre itself that spent decades trying to prevent them being formed in the first place. It should be grateful to the skateboarders who extended a hand at the last moment and made sure it failed.

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