There and Back Again with Dave Brown - age 40 / zilliondave@ntlworld.com

I grew up in Golborne, Lancashire, a fairly poor and nondescript coal-mining town, and saw my first skateboarders in 1975 while on holiday in Ilfracombe. Maybe they were American surfers on holiday in the UK. They were very confident, bombing down roads overlooking Ilfracombe's beach, at least one of them barefoot, hitching rides from passing cars and attracting lots of attention. I can't recall whether I'd heard of skateboarding before that day, but I instinctively knew there was no going back. I'd bought a foam surfboard a few days before so I was always going to end up surfing or skating one way or another.

It wasn't long before a clapped out rollerskate had been cut in two and nailed to a piece of wood. My friend Gary thought it was great and the other rollerskate met the same fate. And so we became two of Lancashire's first skateboarders.

There were no magazines, no other skaters that we knew of, nowhere to buy any real skateboards. Rubber wheels and dodgy bearings don't make for good energy conservation, so skating was really about finding steep hills to trundle down. We were constantly experimenting with deck shapes and made at least one set of rubber wheeled popsicle longboards with go-faster stripes. We'd never seen griptape, so deck tops were painted with gloss house paint.

As there was no-one to learn from we just did what we liked, inventing all sorts of tricks which later on we found out everyone else was doing too. Coffins, daffy-ducks, hang-tens, slalom and giant slalom around stones placed in the road.

A year passed before much changed, during which time we went further afield looking for hills to skate, including the long driveway at Haigh Hall Wigan, the road next to Wigan Baths, and various other smooth asphalt roads and paths around Wigan. We used up all the old rollerskates we could get hold of.

In 1976 things started to take off. Skuda Flyers started to appear in Toy and Sports shops. These were basically the same as our home made efforts and quite cheap. They didnt have real trucks, just pieces of u-shaped metal plate with rubber bushes shoved in them. The wheels were soft rubber. I bought one in Wigan and bombed down the nearest hill on it. The truck bushings were so soft I got speed wobble and came flying off. The board didnt last long but the top did get a coat of gloss house paint with my name in large letters.

The next board was another Skuda, but this was a 'real' skateboard, with a deck made of some sort of plastic resembling fibreglass, real trucks, and urethane wheels. This was heaven compared to the rubber wheeled boards. It just flew along and even turned properly. There was no kicktail. The deck just tapered off at the back to about 3 inches wide.

As there were still no magazines it didnt occur to us that skateboards could be used to skate transitions. We began experimenting with jump ramps made from scrap wood and old pallets. Industrial gauntlets, canoe helmets, and coal-miners knee pads were tried out.

It was at this stage I recall meeting up with other skaters for the first time. At the far end of Mesnes Park in Wigan an asphalt path had been set aside for skaters, as it was silky smooth and sloped downhill gently for quite a long way. I realised that a whole bunch of kids had better boards than me but had only just started skating. The craze was beginning!!

I can remember there being about twenty skaters in Mesnes Park on a saturday afternoon. Things were pretty friendly really and about ten skaters at a time would make 'crocodiles' and all pile down the gentle slope (basically two skaters sit sideways on their boards facing each other, with their feet on the other skaters board. now get five or six other pairs of skaters to tag on behind and you have a 'crocodile'). It's one of the funniest things I ever did on a skateboard. It's great till someone's board drifts off and then everyone piles up completely knackering the guys at the front.

The first skateparks began to open. The first I knew of was at the old Wrighton wrestling ring in Bolton, but I think this was closely followed by Stalybridge. It was an indoor concrete park with a large bowl, snake run, freestyle area and slalom run ending in a transition to wallride. A wooden half-pipe was slotted into a recess at the bottom of the freestyle slope.

The TV presenter Stuart Hall did the official opening, and a freestyle competion was held. I can remember one skater doing a hand-stand which went down well. The place was crammed with hundreds of people. Over the next few weeks it was very difficult to get in on a Saturday as there were hundreds of kids there. Each of the runs (bowl/snake/slalom) had a marshal making sure kids took it in turns. You were only allowed on the runs once you had gained the right coloured proficiency badge. The problem was you had to demonstrate your ability on the run you wanted to ride to get the badge, but the marshals wouldn't let you get any practice on the runs until you had the badge.

The design of the park was well intentioned, so someone there knew what a skatepark should look like, but the construction was hopeless. The transition at the end of the slalom run was angled away from you meaning you were thrown sideways into a wall if you hit it with any speed. The transitions in the snake run were lethal. The bowl was quite impressive but pretty lumpy, and only the black badge riders were allowed on it. It ran the length of the building with a wall on the left and at the far end. The concrete went right up the far wall and so the transitions must have varied from about 7 feet deep to as much as 15 feet.

For some reason the marshals wouldn't let most kids even try for a black badge so it was some time before I got to ride the bowl.

Stalybridge was outdoor, and built behind the sports centre. There was an asphalt bowl which being asphalt went to about a 45 degree transition. It was about six or seven feet deep. Next to it was a reservoir with concrete transitioned walls about 3 feet high. I went along the week after it opened and like Bolton it was crammed with skaters. The bowl and reservoir were fun to skate, but the local kids weren't too friendly and the 'marshals' were freaking out trying to extort money out of everyone, shouting and screaming. One of the marshals tried to steal my board off me saying it belonged to one of his friends. I went back a couple of times over the years. The last time it was deserted except for 3 local skaters who gave me a hard time and tried to stop me skating their park, and the bowl was flooded.

Having seen real skateparks we built more and more adventurous wooden ramps on the local supermarket car park out of the tons of scrap wood which littered Golborne. It was the late seventies and Britain was in a pretty bad way really, there was junk everywhere we could use to make ramps. They were often short lived as the supermarket workers would clear everything away every so often, but there was so much scrap wood about we'd just build another one each weekend. I think the bigest ramp we built was about 8 feet
high and was as near vertical as we could make it given it had to be propped up from behind.

About this time a photo appeared in a local paper of someone skating a metal pipe about 10 feet in diameter in an engineering works in nearby Newton Le Willows. We soon found the pipe and enjoyed skating it. It was short lived although we managed a few visits. On one visit we met the 'famous' skater from the newspaper article who tried to bully us into leaving as it was 'his' pipe. We also got rounded up and accused of trashing the works canteen.

The biggest advance in British skating was the arrival of Skateboard! Magazine in about August 1977. Until then everyone had been isolated and things developed slowly. Now we could see adverts for the best skateboards being sold by Alpine Sports. Also pictures of American skaters at the most amazing skateparks.

We couldnt afford the skateboards being advertised but very soon were making our own wooden decks from several thin laminated sheets of plywood glued together and compressed with anything heavy lying around the garage, and so a new stage of experimentation arrived. Every conceivable wooden deck shape was tried out and as time went by the decks got larger and wider. I bought a pair of California Slalom trucks which were about the widest trucks you could buy at the time. They were 7 inches from wheel nut to wheel nut. The bushings were extremely soft and you had to tighten the trucks up so much the bushings would disintegrate in no time. In the end I would cut up old wheels to make truck bushings.

Skateboard! magazine was a big influence, but seemed unconnected with our skating up in Lancashire. It was pretty much centred around London, which I'd never been to and couldn't imagine visiting.

Me and some mates discovered two 8 foot deep california style 'drainage ditch' shaped cess pits in a disused sewage treatment plant in Ashton in Makerfield not far from our homes. We spent about four days shovelling six inches of shit out of one. The next weekend we went back to skate it and some more skaters (who we didn't even know) had already added cement transitions. I always think of this moment when people talk about commitment to skateboarding.

I guess it was the following summer of 1978 that Southport Solid Surf Skatepark opened on the sea-front. Here I could and did imagine I really lived in California and lived out the Dog-Town dream. I remember top skaters Stefan Harkon and Sheenagh Burdell (hot 70's U.K. girl skater) and her parent's skate shop where we met Shugo Kubo one day.

At some point everyone is faced with the decision to stop skating. I stopped when I was 16 back in 1979. Why? Because skating died overnight, my mates stopped skating, Skateboard! Magazine disappeared and with it any chance of keeping in touch with the skating scene. Looking back I think skater's in the 70's were nearly all the same age due to the craze boom, and when everyone left school in 79 and had other priorities thousands of skateboards ended up in hall cupboards. I kept going until the end of the summer but when the good weather ended I stopped skating and began a new hobby with computers.

This became a career in Software Development, and I married and had my first child. I might never have skated again, but three events led me to reassess my life. In 1993 I was shopping in Warrington the day the IRA bomb blew up the main shopping street. In 1996 I was driving from the North West to London the day the IRA planted bombs on the UK motorway system. With hindsight they were mostly hoaxes but on my journey that day I drove right past four of the bomb locations at EXACTLY the point the radio announced the warnings for each location.

I had already became deeply disillusioned with my career, being told by the computing industry that I (along with everyone else over 35 in the industry) was too old to develop software. That day on the journey to London I thought seriously about what I really wanted to do with my life, and only a skater will understand this, but I realised the best thing in my whole life had been the five years I skated in the seventies. Everything I'd done since I abandoned skating for computers seemed like a cul-de-sac. I hadn't given skating any real thought for seventeen years and faced with near-death it turned out to be my 'last wish'.

I had no idea there was a skateboarding scene any more, skating had kept itself so underground between 1980 and 1996 that it passed me by. I dug out my old 70's Skateboard! magazines, got the address of Alpine Sports, thinking that as it was the biggest skateshop in the 70's maybe it would still be going. At the next opportunity I turned up at the address to find the shop long gone, and by a stroke of luck discovered Sidewalk Surfer in a newsagent across the road. One visit to Sean Goff's shop shortly afterwards and I was away. Thanks to Sean Goff for the encouragement and understanding shown that day.

I had four years of fun visiting skateparks around the country as my job took me out on site twice a week. It was rare to see anyone else my age skating but I really didn't care by then. In 2000 our second child arrived, my globe-trotting job came to an end and it became impossible to take time out to skate. I didn't stop skating as such, just didn't see daylight for three years.

In the meantime the world moved on and the Dogtown film came and went and a new generation of old-timers rediscovered skating. In June 2003 I suddenly realised I had enough time and energy to start skating again and by coincidence found a UK supplier of 'Fruit of the Vine', a video I'd been meaning to buy for a couple of years since hearing about it's US release. Watching this film was all the motivation I needed. I went mad and bought a reproduction 70's pool riding board and as a result followed a link to the MAS website.

I'm still getting back into the swing of things, but have already joined in a couple of sunday morning MAS sessions at Stockport Bones and had a brilliant time at the August 2003 late night MAS session. Carl is a real 'Mr Motivator' and I'm more confident than I've ever been that this time round I'll never stop skating and never stop progressing.