A fictional and biographical account of my experience in the evolving late 80's and early 90's skateboard and BMX culture.
I always wanted to write a novel… haven’t you?
My late teen’s and early 20’s was the time in my life that I’d often thought I should write about. I certainly felt I had a lot of material from back then. However, going back to the late 1980’s and early 90’s opened up old unresolved issues for me. Issues I then had to deal with of course, if I was going to try and make something out of it. The sheer amount of material I had to work with, and all the ideas it spawned, also contributed to this project taking just fuckin ages. There never was a deadline, which didn’t help either.
The novel I would write would of course be in the ‘magic realism’ genre - because that’s the genre I like reading so much - and sitting still for at least three hours a day writing and re-writing wouldn’t be a problem for me… Clearly, it was. Possibly a similar reason to why I’ve only ever developed my own films once in my entire life: being inside and on my own working is not a natural environment for me. Out exploring and entertaining feels much better. This project should give you a clue to why I often feel like that.
So, it turns out I’m not a novelist and would like to offer a little apology about the quality of the writing. I have no regrets about trying, but I almost certainly won’t write a novel again. It was important to me to finish this one though, and publish it. Will concentrate to short stories, taking photographs and making zines in future.
The entire book is available here digitally and I’ve also made 20 printed copies. 15 with envelopes that have grip tape on the inside. Hopefully it scratch your fingers and slowly destroy the book every time you take it out. They also feature newly screen printed Trumpton Riot Squad stickers and are held together with laces that are similar to the ones I was told to take out of my Vans in Retford Police Station when I got locked up for skateboarding aged 16.
Now that this project is finished, I’m actively looking for an organisation to take over my archive of skateboard and BMX photographs (negatives, slides, contact sheets and prints) and magazines. It all dates from between about 1985 and 1993. Please get in touch if you are interested or know a museum or youth culture organisation that might want to take it off me with a view to indexing it properly and then making it available. We had no idea at the time of course what a rich few years in the evolution of BMX and skateboarding we were in the midst of, and subconsciously helping to shape.
Looking back now it really was quite an intense and rich period. We wanted to move the activities away from the uniformed, competitive formats they were in. The reason a lot of us did this was because we didn’t feel comfortable with the win/loose, binary, competitive attitude already (and still rife) in sports like football and hockey. The team, region or country riders came from was just not that interesting to us. A bit of healthy competition is great for pushing things forward, but you can’t really judge creativity. So perhaps what we went through back then just managed to keep it out of the olympics for nearly 30 years…
James Hudson
July 2026