News

November 12, 2024 | Events

Common Grounds: Skateboarding, Learning and the Built Environment

17 May 2024 at UCL East Campus

The inaugural edition of Common Grounds: a new symposium dedicated to understanding skateboarding through practice based research. Supported by University College London and Goldsmiths.

Common Grounds draws together multi-modal approaches to research across different disciplines, focusing on how skateboarding frames ideas relating to placemaking, community and learning. Alongside examining how participatory design can be used as a vehicle for fostering a legacy of ownership and belonging within skateable spaces.

Programming across the day consisted of a keynote presentation, three panel discussions, a film screening, and a session skating the community designed skate dots at City Mill Pool Street. Common Grounds explores how creative and participatory approaches to community engagement can influence the design and use of public spaces, and how skate communities subsequently form around them.

The Common Grounds programme also seeks to generate a particular understanding of the embodied and sensory knowledges that contribute to our understanding of how learning takes place in skateable spaces.

Speakers:

Prof Iain Borden, UCL – author of Skateboarding and the City

Bedir Bekar, UCL – architect and engineer and lecturer

Ben Dixon, Goldsmiths – Postgraduate research, Goldsmiths Listening to skateboarding: a multimodal exploration of an urban development project in East London.

Ben Borthwick – Curator @primedesignplymouth and Head of Programme at Karst

Dr Sheryl Clark, Goldsmiths – author of Skateparks as Communities of Care

Tom Critchley – Goldsmiths – Postgraduate Research

John Dahlquist – Vice Principal of The Bryggeriets Gymnasium School, Malmo

Sam Elstub – Hackney Bumps and Betongpark – landscape architect

Sam Griffin – artist and co-founder City Mill Skate

Dr Sander Hølsgens, Leiden University – co-editor of Skate/Worlds: New Pedagogies for Skateboarding (w. Adelina Ong)

Chris Lawton – Skateboard GB

Stuart Maclure – Long Live Southbank and Betongpark

Marie Mayassi – founder Melanin Skate Gals and Pals

Harry Meadley – artist and director of Civic Skateboarding

Dr Paul O’Connor – Exeter University – author of Skateboarding and Religion

Prof Carrie Paechter – Nottingham Trent University – author of What’s it like to be a girl skateboarder? (with Stoodley, Keenan and Lawton)

Lucy Raemers – co-founder of The Ben Raemers Foundation

Dr Esther Sayers – Goldsmiths – co-founder City Mill Skate and author of Skateboarding, Time and Ethics

 

With remote interventions from:

Sophie Friedel – author of The Art of Living Sideways

Dr Indigo Willing, University of Sydney – author of Skateboarding, Power and Change (with Anthony Pappalardo)

June 10, 2023 | Events

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! 🔨💸

March 8, 2023 | Skate Dots

A Guided Tour of City Mill Pool Street

Feast your eyes and ears on a wonderful audio guided tour of City Mill Pool Street from our friend and Hackney Bumps legend, Sol Dhariwal 👀🔊🔀

Some of you may remember Ricky Oyola’s unforgettable guided tour of City Hall in Philadelphia many, many moons ago for 411 Video Magazine – well here’s our version!

Sol leaves no stone unturned – so make sure you turn your sound up for a full audio tour complete with added wallies, hippy jumps and even our rainbow rail in the mix. Sol shows us an exciting range of trick possibilities to recreate at City Mill Pool Street – now if it would only stop raining…🙏

Big shout out to Tom Lock too – for capturing Sol and our skate dots in all their sunny glory 🎥😎🛹

 

Video: A Guided Tour of City Mill Pool Street

 

October 30, 2022 | Skate Dots

Meet the City Mill Skate team – UCL

As you may have guessed, it has taken the talents of a large group of people to bring the final City Mill Pool Street space to life, with huge amounts of dedication and hard work from a number of organisations including:
  • UCL
  • The Bartlett School of Architecture
  • Betongpark
  • Melanin Gals n’ Pals
  • Free Skate Mag
  • Vans
With so many different people involved in helping the City Mill Skate project along the way, we have produced a series of short films to introduce some of the dedicated people who have worked behind the scenes to make Pool Street a reality!
It’s our great pleasure to introduce you to:

Sam Wilkinson, Head of Public Art and Cultural Engagement, UCL East

As the original instigator of the City Mill Skate project, Sam has worked tirelessly to promote the idea of a skateable space on the UCL East Campus and her expertise in delivering public art projects has been vital time and time again over the course of the four years leading up the construction of City Mill Pool Street.

Iain Borden: Professor of Architecture and Urban Culture, The Bartlett School of Architecture, UCL

Alongside being a world renowned architecture academic and skateboard historian, Iain has been a vocal supporter of the City Mill Skate project from the very start. Iain’s celebrated books Skateboarding, Space and the City: Architecture and the Body and Skateboarding and the City: A Complete History were hugely influential in the initial thinking behind our project.
October 30, 2022 | Skate Dots

Meet the City Mill Skate team – Betongpark

Daryl Nobbs, Lead Designer, Betongpark 

Daryl is an experienced skatepark designer and founder of Betongpark Ltd, an innovative design studio that fuses elements of skatepark design with landscape architecture. As a key figure of the Hackney Bumps renovation project, Daryl has a deep understanding of creating skateable spaces within east London and has played a pivotal role in developing the research and design methods that culminated in the final City Mill Pool Street space.

Stuart Maclure, Development Manager, Betongpark

As a key member of the Betongpark team, Stuart has a huge level of experience in managing high profile construction projects, as well as playing a critical role in saving Southbank, the oldest continually used street spot in the UK, from redevelopment.
October 30, 2022 | Skate Dots

Meet the City Mill Skate team – Melanin Skate Gals & Pals

Marie Mayassi, Melanin Skate Gals & Pals

Marie Mayassi is the founder of Melanin Skate Gals & Pals, a grass roots initiative focused on building skate communities in east London and beyond that cater for the needs of those who are often excluded from sport activities such as marginalised genders, the LGBTQIA+ community, and Black and other People Of Colour.
Marie played a crucial role in our final design process for the Pool Street site, offering fresh perspectives on how best to create inclusive and dynamic skateable spaces.
October 30, 2022 | Skate Dots

Meet the City Mill Skate team – Free Skate Mag

Will Harmon, Sam Ashley and Arthur Derrien, Free Skate Mag

Will Harmon, Sam Ashley and Arthur Derrien are the founders of Free Skate Mag. With a huge knowledge of skateboard history and culture between them, their insights have been absolutely essential in filtering the skate dot ideas we received and working with the City Mill Skate and Betongpark teams to realise our partnership launch event in conjunction with Vans.
October 17, 2022 | Events

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