Skateboarding: Health And Safety Nightmare?

The teenage years of skateboarding were no less difficult than any of our teenage years. Although skateboarding parks had been built at a great rate and enjoyed by many tens of thousands of eager young skaters, the spectre of the establishment manage to get involved. The skateboard parks were centres of excellence but also places where young people injured themselves whilst trying to improve their tricks and skills. This led to the increase in insurance premiums for the owners of these parks and unsurprisingly many parks began to close.

This has been a familiar story in the history skateboarding, the rising popularity followed by the inevitable decline for one reason or another. And as always those that were hooked continued everywhere and anywhere they could. From building ramps and jumps at home to using any of the pre-existent opportunities in the cities and towns skateboarding continued and changed.

This latest twist meant that skateboarders became even more alternative and underground. No longer were they to be found in public parks and authorised places of enjoyment, now they turned the whole world into one big skating skills park.

So, no longer constrained by the mainstream world, a series of events took place in the 1980s which individually seem innocuous enough but together, with hindsight, form the next evolutionary leap toward today's version of the sport.

The first of these was the appearance of skateboard companies which were started and funded by skateboarders themselves. Just like the surfers 10 or 20 years earlier they created new shapes, styles and colours for the boards. And with each company came a logo which later will become very significant.

The second of these was the invention of the VCR, a seemingly unrelated event but incredibly important. Handheld video cameras allowed a group of professional skateboarders to produce a series of short films on video for skateboarders. They were named the Bones Brigade. The members of the Bones Brigade were many of the most famous professional skateboarders of the time. The importance, apart from bringing tricks and skills to less experienced skateboarders, was the proliferation of the style and clothing that these guys wore whilst boarding. We take the Internet for granted these days but back then getting hold of one of these videos was like peering into another world.

These two seemingly unrelated events were the roots of the 90s and 2000s skateboarding culture. Towards the end of the 80s the fascination with vert faltered primarily due to the fact that to Street skaters verts were less relevant to their surroundings. As we moved into the 90s skateboarding edged its nose into the mainstream once again. This time however it expanded on the anti-establishment and disenfranchised attitude as it coincided with punk and the growing uneasiness that marked the mid-90s. The clothing, the music, the brand logos and the general idea that skaters were angry, young and poor all came together to create, at least in the public eye, a generalisation of what it meant to be a skater.

For many people the annoyance of a group of youths scraping and scratching, tricking and jumping through a shopping mall will never go away. But the style and the skill involved cannot be ignored. These guys and girls are a credit to our culture. There can be no doubt that skateboarding will change again and perhaps no one can see where it's going; but it is here to stay.