Skate Park Life

The first time I went to a skatepark was in the early 80’s. It was next to a pig slaughter house on Strawberry Road in my home town of Retford in Nottinghamshire. The skatepark had been built some years earlier at the tail end of the 70’s, no doubt after much local council debate and whose completion coincided perfectly with the death of the first skateboarding craze in the UK. As a skatepark it was not very good, for a 13 year old boy it was a unique and exciting place.This was not somewhere that your parents had been to, it was not an organised, recognised sports facility like a tennis court or a football pitch. Retford skatepark was the kind of place you went to smoke, a place to smash bottles and to fight. It was a bit rough and I do not ever remember being there on my own. As we got better at doing tricks on our bikes the Strawberry Road skatepark started to feel a bit limiting. The constant sweeping up of glass and the noise and smell of the pigs, were never really endearing features of the place and I went there less and less. We built our own ramp in the garden, started to enter competitions and began to travel to bigger and better skateparks. In the early 90’s I started taking photographs seriously and contributing them to specialist skateboard and bmx magazines but it was always the trick, or the rider, that was the focus of my pictures.The overall environment of the skatepark was not really of interest to me at the time, I just took them for granted. Riding my bmx and taking pictures for magazines eventually stopped and I got involved in other work. Occasionally I would end up in a skatepark and sometimes borrow a bike or a board and have a go. In 2003 I started riding my bike again a little more seriously. I was again regularly in skatepark environments but I looked at them in a different way now: the tricks and the riders were not the only thing that mattered. My interest was now much broader and I started to photograph it in a different way. No longer ignoring the people who were just hanging around and now looking at the whole space. I finally saw skateparks as places people grow up and not just place where they do tricks. My renewed interest in riding my bike soon dissolved, not so much the physical strain but the fact that I knew it could never feel as good as the times I had spent riding and growing up in skateparks. This collection of pictures is from skateparks during an regularly interrupted period between the years 1988 and 2008. James Hudson