Culture: skateboarding in Brighton

Brighton skaters Tony Lord and Alan Glass recall their experiences of skateboaring in the city:

'The first skateboard park in the Brighton area was near Southwick Football Club. It was called the Barn Skateboard Park and that was great 'cos they had a great big rectangular sort of like freestyle skating area... and then they had, the two best bits was they had a concrete bowl and they had an actual swimming pool bowl to emulate the Americans skating up the swimming pools ... We probably spent more time there than anywhere else ... The best bit about that was when I left school in '77, for all the summer holiday ... we went over there with our skateboards practically every day and [took a] ghetto blaster with tapes of The Stranglers and the Sex Pistols and The Clash on it and it was the most idyllic summer ...

'... After the Barn they then opened up a skateboard park in Brighton which was called The Cage which was actually in one of the sets of seafront arches and that was quite unusual 'cos it was all made out of fibre glass. It had a huge bowl which was made out of fibre glass which ... when you rode it, when you went from side to side made this wonderful sort of like whooshing thundering noise ...

' ...The other thing the council did was they actually allocated one of the seafront ramps for skateboarding as well ... the one the Brighton side of the West Pier. The only thing you could actually do there was we used to do slalom racing which we used to set up a line of Coke cans ... and you'd race head to head doing slalom through Coke cans, which was great fun and being a ramp you actually got up quite a bit of speed, if you misjudged the distance from the Coke cans you'd get one wedged in the front of the truck [wheel] that would stop the skateboard dead and you'd fly off hurtling down the ramp.'

Tony Lord, oral history Interview, OH000183

'...[The Level] It's a bunch of wooden ramps made by, mostly by the skateboarders. It kind of mirrors pretty much every other skate park. There's I guess a fashionable template for skate parks these days. In the 70s it used to be bowls and curves and you know sort of pool shapes and stuff, these days it's kind of flat banks from sort of rails and boxes and things that mirror objects in the street really. But it seems silly to have a skate park that mirrors what we already have in the street, but most skateboarders will tell you that, you know, skating the streets is a pain in the arse in terms of weather, other people getting in the way and hassle from security guards and whoever else, interfering old ladies and stuff.'

Alan Glass, oral history interview, OH000109

These excerpts are taken from oral history interviews that form part of the Renegade collection, which illustrates the history of subcultures in Brighton.
Explore more oral history interveiws with skaters in Community History