From my early teens to my early twenties, my life was skateboarding and BMXing on ramps we had built, riding out on the street, competing, doing demonstrations and photographing it all and making zines. My friends and I did this all over the UK, and occasionally in Europe and California. This was the time when riders started to take control from the parents and companies who had set it up, and in doing so, created a new counter-culture.
The sheer amount of material I had to work with, and all the ideas it spawned, contributed to this project taking fucking ages. There was never a deadline, which didn’t help either. I wanted it to be a novel, rather than any objective document of the period or a lush, colour photographic coffee table book. But I hadn’t ever really written fiction before.
It is finally done. It appears I’m not much of a novelist, so would like to offer an apology about the quality of some of the writing. I have no regrets, it was more important to finish it, and will now get back to taking photographs, travel writing and short stories.
The book is available digitally on my website, and there are twenty printed copies. Fourteen of them come in envelopes with skateboard grip tape on the inside. Hopefully it will scratch your fingers and slowly destroy the book every time you take it out or put it back in. The books are bound with laces similar to the pair I was told to take out of my Vans in Retford Police Station having been locked up for skateboarding at sixteen.
Now that the project is finished, I’m looking for a museum or other suitable organisation to take over my archive of the thousands of skateboard and BMX photographs (negatives, slides, contact sheets, and prints), books, zines and magazines. It all dates from between 1985 and 1993.
We had no idea at the time 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 these activities away from the uniformed and competitive formats they were stuck in. Many of us did not like the win/lose binary and competitive attitude of sports like football and hockey. The team, or country that riders came from was just not that interesting to us, it was the creativity and energy that mattered, and you can’t really judge that.
BMX and skateboarding did eventually become mainstream and end up in the Olympics,
so perhaps all we managed to achieve back then was to keep it out of there for nearly thirty years.
so perhaps all we managed to achieve back then was to keep it out of there for nearly thirty years.
James Hudson
Oct 2026