Skating the Urban Playground An apology (mixed with a qualification) is no place to start anything. But it's important to confess that much as I keep in touch with skating and am planning (honestly) a new set-up, I haven't actually stood on a board since summer 2001. And even then, I was terrible. By my own standards. By anyone's standards. Why is this pertinent? It means there is a gap there of a few months. Tie it to the fact that I'm 32 and you could driftnet the gulf between myself and the average Belfast 14 year-old nu-metallist. More, it emphasises the dynamic nature of skating. Those couple of months won't have changed everything, but the fact is skating reinvents and renews itself with a headlong speed. Downhill fast. Not from one generation to the next, but from year-to-year and, to an extent, from month-to-month. The tricks, the hardware, the clothing and the associated trends, everything from speech to music to drugs, they all change and are subject to change. Sometimes these changes are forced, from outside a skater's control. Spots, areas of skateable terrain, are sites for sessions and for hook-ups. But they can get closed and replacements must be sought and inhabited. Hence, for example, the shift from Belfast's Art College across to St Anne's. Other changes are consciously selected. The move to St Anne's also coincided with the assumption of San Francisco's EMB as skateboarding's central point of reference. EMB, an urban plaza of steps and ledges in downtown SF, featured heavily in skate video after skate video, beginning with the first Plan B. Skate video was and is a promo tool used by companies to showcase their sponsored riders. But it's also more. EMB's rise highlighted a development in skating, but also offered a series of new styles (the baggy, sub-raver, fat jeans included), new sounds, a new attitude (EMB, a place, was also the name it's local heads assumed). All these were co-opted. And St Anne's in some ways matched the architecture, even if it lacked the NorCal weather. That there was much blind aping of US styles should be unsurprising, since every youth culture post-1945 has done so. But skating, with it's home in California, is particularly guilty of it. It is a world, to appropriate Frederic Jameson's phrase, perceiving itself to be American. To a greater or lesser extent. As time passed, the focus shifted from SF to the East Coast, then to LA. St Anne's, meanwhile, remained. Skateboarding's expropriation of urban space is a contemporary phenomenon which is almost without parallel. Skaters share space with the homeless and the marginalised. They occupy areas which may have been designated urban spaces, but which the public (in the planner's catch-all phrase) have never used or experienced. And skaters do experience the city - they have a far more tangible and real relationship with their surroundings than the average city-dweller. At the most basic level, any local skater can tell you how long it will take each of Belfast's 57 varieties of concrete to dry - an absolute rule is don't skate in the rain, unless you want your board to get soggy. At the other level, there is the reinterpretation of the urban area as playground. Utilities - steps and rails and curbs - become playthings. The difficulty for any city government is that even though skaters are amongst the very few users of public space, their very actions are destructive. The actions of wax and metal on stone, wheels on paving all mark and stain. Another factor in the move to St Anne's was that the Art College, a spot centred on a low double step, was being destroyed, literally. This, combined with skateboarding's youth bias and (half-)self-imposed outsider status, isn't going to endear it to anyone in City Hall. That outsider badge may be a badge worn a little too obviously by some, particularly in the days of skating as xtreme entertainment, regular usage in advertising and the reality of a multi-million dollar industry, but run-ins with the police and rent-a-cops don't do anything to dispel it. And whilst skating can be controlled to an extent with the opening of public and private skateparks, there will always be an urge to session real streets. Where possible, in St Anne's as was, a spot develops and it becomes almost an occupied area, a liberated zone. This can be seen all around the world, at Bristo in Edinburgh, London's South Bank, NYC's Brooklyn Banks. It can be skated anytime. Those areas which cannot be colonised can at least be temporarily skated in the city's downtime, after shops and offices close. That set of steps, that handrail. In doing so, skaters invert the 9 to 5 and offer a counterlogic and literal alternative to what city life presently is. And Belfast skaters have also seized any moment which our own peculiar situation presents. I can remember a Drumcree (2 or 3?) skating down the middle of Bedford Street unmolested, the two or three of us the only ones in the city centre. Given these imaginative, liberating activities, it's ironic that St Anne's, admittedly bloated by hangers-on, was cleared and redeveloped in almost a textbook example of gentrification. In a half-conscious assault by the local authorities, this "enhancement" and the designation of the Cathedral area as a creative quarter excluded the skaters who had called the area home for the previous five years. To an extent, this all comes from my own endpoint, a skater after skating. The fact is, I still see my environment through the eyes of a skater. I only half-see the office block thanks to the attention I'm paying to the steps around back with the ledge running off. Spaces become different. It's an active and imaginative process of reinvention. Regardless of ability you imagine lines and hits. Usually, in my case, what-ifs... Maybe, ultimately, that's all you are left with. Because it will break your heart but you gotta stop sometime, if only because your knees have given in and are messed-up enough to feel rain coming. And if this is the end of it all for me, in spite of my best intent, then I can tell you that it was the best of times. Friends made and places seen. And there was a time being into skating and being into hardcore punk rock (a not always mutually exclusive mix) guaranteed floorspace world over. So I can smile at the recollection of standing at the South Bank for first time (having run all the ways from the tube, as if they would have closed it before I got there), of saying hey to a kid in a Stooges tee in Brooklyn just because he had a board under his arm. And I remember the good times at St Anne's. And I liked going down hills fast.
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