Borden, IM; (2017) Skateboard City: London in Skateboarding Films. In: O'Rourke, C and Hirsch, P, (eds.) London on Film. (pp. 177-192). Palgrave Macmillan: London, UK.

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Abstract

London has been part of the worldwide phenomenon of skateboarding, from the early 1970s right through to the present day. Important sites in the city include the highly contested ‘Undercroft’ area of the Southbank, early purpose-built skateparks such as ‘Skate City’, ‘Rolling Thunder’, ‘Maddog Bowl’ and ‘Rom’, public spaces such as Kensington Gardens and Crystal Palace, and appropriated street sites in locations as diverse as the Shell Centre, Bishopsgate and St Paul’s. This chapter charts the documentation of skateboarding in the UK capital as caught on film, showing how these sites made up a vibrant skateboarding scene. In doing so, it also charts the dramatically changing technologies by which these film documentations occurred, from the earliest days of amateur movies and sporadic news coverage (capturing the relatively innocent arrival of skateboarding as a youthful pastime), through camcorder footage of the burgeoning street-skateboarding scene of the 1990s (raising issues of subculture, urban space and masculinity) through to today’s scene, where a plethora of art-based films, documentaries, social media clips and guerrilla-style advertising have become an integral part of a rich and pluralistic skateboard scene. Film is thus shown to not only help record different space and sites, but also to express and give voice to a changing set of social meanings over the last 40 years.

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