News
City Mill Pool Street Jam – SUNDAY 25th JUNE!
⚠️SUNDAY 25th JUNE ⚠️
Save the date for the City Mill Pool Street Jam! 🗓️📝🎉
The day will start with free beginner coaching from 10am to 12pm. All ages, genders and abilities welcomed😃
Sign up for the afternoon Jam opens at 1PM. Sign up will close 15 minutes before your category starts! ⏰👀
At 1.30pm we will have a beginner priority obstacle course where you’ll only compete against yourself and fun is the aim of the game. 🔀😊
There will be three categories for the jam, split into 2 minute heats:
– 2pm under 16 girls and marginalised gender.
– 3pm under 16 boys.
– 4pm over 16 womxn and marginalised gender.
And to finish the day we will have a +16, open to all gender, CASH FOR BEST TRICK! 🔨💸
City Mill Pool Street Opening Event!
Huge thanks to everyone who made it to our opening event for City Mill Pool Street! It was a fantastic day and we hope you enjoyed it as much as we did 😍🎉
Without your support and interest, our project would never have been possible! 🙌
Check out our photo gallery of the skate dots getting put through their paces by a wide range of rippers, captured by the ever-talented Rafski and Keep Rolling ⚡️🔨📸
Extra props to Keep Rolling for putting a fantastic recap video edit of the day too!
Video: City Mill Pool Street Launch Event
Huge thanks also to Free Skate Mag , Vans ,Faruso and Jin , Signature Brew , UCL and Betongpark
2022 East Summer School Video Recap
Check out the recap video from our 2022 East Summer School programme, with highlights from our skate school lessons provided by the expert tutors at Learn To Skateboard UK , as well as our media workshops too! Many thanks to all our Summer School participants and to Keep Rolling for all their support 😃
2021 East Summer School Video Recap + Special Announcement!
With summer 2022 upon us, here’s a video recap of our popular summer school programme from last year, realised in conjunction with Here East and funded by UCL Public Art. 🌞🎓
As well as benefiting from expert skate lessons from the team at Learn To Skateboard UK , our lucky summer school participants also got to design their own skate dots as part of our special model making workshops.
As a final surprise, the team at our construction partners, Betongpark, then constructed one of the skate dot ideas at full size for our participants to try out! 🔨🪚🛹
Since the start of the City Mill Skate project, our main challenge has been to find a home for our skate dots. But we are very pleased to announce that we have now secured our very own space – to realise our aim of building a new kind of inclusive skateable space featuring skate dots on the UCL East campus in the Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park! 📍🌳🌿🍃🎉
Subject to planning approval, we will be able to begin building full size skate dots in autumn 2022 – and once completed, we look forward to inviting you to our new home to come and to test them out for real, alongside an exciting programme of events 👀🛹
2021 East Summer School Video Recap
City Mill Skate panel discussion as part of the London Festival of Architecture
As part of the 2022 London Festival of Architecture, City Mill Skate hosted a panel discussion at the UCL East Marshgate site within Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park.
Alongside exploring the history of the City Mill Skate project to date, our panel also discussed how the project could be used to create more inclusive skateable places in the future.
Our panel for the talk included:
Dr Esther Sayers, City Mill Skate
Sam Griffin, City Mill Skate
Simon Cane, Director of Cultural Engagement UCL
Daryl Nobbs, Director, Betongpark
Marie Mayassi, Melanin Skate Gals and Pals
The discussion covered the logistical challenges faced by the City Mill Skate team in delivering a program of community engagement and participatory design during the COVID-19 pandemic and associated lockdowns. Esther and Sam from the City Mill Skate team went on to trace the City Mill journey in building a proposal designed to culminate in the creation of a new form of skateable space. A space that balances concerns around: the need for safe public spaces for a diverse set of user groups via skateable architecture, ensuring biodiversity, and also responding to the unique set of environmental concerns that govern Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park itself.
For more details of the London Festival of Architecture talk, please check out our gallery showcasing the presentation slides discussed by the panel.
‘No Comply’ skate exhibition at Somerset House
Since we founded the City Mill Skate project in 2019, we have been interested in capturing the voices of a wide range of skaters across East London and beyond. 📍🌇🗺
With this in mind, it’s an honour for us to be included in ‘No Comply’ – a new exhibition at Somerset House exploring the phenomena of skateboarding and the impact of its culture and communities on the UK over the past 45 years. 🙌
Curated by Tork Turk @tory_turk with special assistance from friend of City Mill Skate, Helena Long @helenalegslong , No Comply is based on an original idea by Frankie Shea and brings together a superb range of photographers, filmmakers and other creatives. Safe to say we are very grateful to be in such great company! 📸🎞🎨🖼📝🛹⚡️
If you are downtown or just en route to Southbank, pop in to Somerset House to check out this fantastic exhibition – No Comply is open until September 19th 👀😃
All 📸 © Tim Bowditch
UCL Lunch Hour Lecture
We are honoured to have been invited recently to take part in the prestigious UCL Lunch Hour Lecture series, alongside Professor Iain Borden @iainborden , Vice Dean of Education at The Bartlett School of Architecture and chaired by Professor Paola Lettieri, Academic Director of UCL East.
Click on the link here to watch our UCL Lunch Hour Lecture, covering the recent history of the City Mill Skate project, the challenges we have faced along the way, and what we have learned so far! 📈
Free Skate Lessons!
Stuck for something to do over the half term holidays? Are you aged 10 – 16 and either attend a school in Newham or live in Newham? 📍
City Mill Skate, Change Grow Live and Here East have teamed up to offer just the thing for you! 😁
From Monday May 31st to Friday June 4th, City Mill Skate in conjunction with Change, Grow, Live are pleased to offer a programme of free skate lessons provided by our partners at Learn To Skateboard – and kindly hosted at Here East in the Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park. 🗓🛹📈
We have 2x lessons on offer per day: taking place at 10am – 12 noon and then 1pm – 3pm, with tuition offered to riders of all abilities by the experienced instructors from the team at Learn To Skateboard. ⏰😃
If you are worried about the terrible weather we’ve had recently, we are pleased to announce that the team at Here East have also kindly let us use the Undercroft area, so we are protected from the elements 🌦☔️
All skateboards, obstacles and safety equipment will be provided – and so if you fancy a chance to learn from some of the best, please follow the link here to sign up via the Change, Grow, Live website to take part!📲💻✔️
Looking forward to seeing you there 👀👋
UCL freshers lecture event – public art and City Mill Skate
As part of the 2020 UCL freshers’ week events, we were invited to present an online lecture covering the history of the City Mill Skate project, our responses to lockdown, and the thinking behind the skate dot ideas we had received so far.
To give our audience a first-hand experience of how a skate dot design and model could take shape, we were kindly assisted by Daryl Nobbs and Dom Alden from the Betongpark team, who put together a live model making demonstration 😃⚡️.
To watch the recording of the whole lecture event, click on the link here. We hope you enjoy it! 👀📈.