By Bee Beardsworth
When you look at the history of skating, it doesn’t immediately appear to be a UK thing, with pop culture leaning towards the legacy of films like Lords of Dogtown and behemoth brands like Supreme. However, there seems to be nowhere that the subculture and lifestyle has rooted itself more outside of the US than in the UK.
Although originally fabricated by frustrated American surfers in the late 1950s, skating had its first major breakthrough in Britain in the 1970s. This era was one of huge social change and countercultural movements, and skating became intertwined with youth culture and alternative lifestyle. Skate parks began to open across the UK, with bowls based on suburban swimming pools, and magazines Skateboard! and R.A.D. established a form of easily transferable documentation of the new communities. Despite many skateparks closing owing to insurance issues, health and safety concerns, and (very likely) conservative county rulings, the streetskating scene became a mainstay in many smaller towns across the country, offering an inexpensive and accessible form of alternative pastime and a place of belonging.
Skateboarding quickly took hold as a huge Gen-X subculture, and skaters became recognisable as a tribe - with distinctive clothes, language and territories. Magazines Thrasher and Sidewalk became platforms for a revolutionary wave of photography and videography of skating. To accommodate the movement of the sport alongside the individualistic personality of the skaters, the materiality of skate documentation leant towards fisheye lenses, strong flashes, punchy colours and high contrast, with directors like Spike Jonze and Larry Clark leading the way on how to immortalise the skaters on celluloid.
The 90s saw elements of skate culture become assimilated into the mainstream as alternatives became mainstream. Music, film and photography echoed skate-related aesthetics, with creatives originating from the skate or skate-adjacent scene embracing the commercial opportunities of the subcultural popularity. The 2000s saw the establishment of UK brand Palace, films like Jackass and Lords of Dogtown, a huge wave of West Coast indie music gone mainstream and a noticeable influx of the skate aesthetic in visual culture.
Growing up on a council estate in Essex, Isaac Lamb didn’t feel like he fit in. In his early teens, he walked past a skate park and saw kids that looked a way he identified with. He asked his mum for a skateboard for Christmas. A self-described misfit, Isaac cites the legendary skating video Fully Flared (2007) as a seminal discovery, as well as the magazine Thrasher.
The social culture of skateboarding had an equally profound effect on him. “The older skaters will look out for the younger skaters. You’ve got to go to a skatepark down the road, so you’re hanging out with these seventeen-year-olds who are smoking joints in the front seat. It might be the first time you've listened to Biggie Smalls or Black Sabbath… Fuck Saturday football, this is what I want to be doing. Everything within the culture is just thrown into you and these older kids are taking care of you.”
Isaac draws connections between the skate scene and other parallel cultural movements. “If you look at skateboarding, it goes along with the hardcore and punk scene, and drug culture and the rave scene. You see the underbelly, the counterculture. You see a free way of living, especially as a younger person.”
Following the same instinctual pull that led to skating, Isaac started photography on an impulse. A few years ago, he found a cheap point and shoot camera at a carboot sale. He had injured his shoulder but had already paid for a skate trip to New York, so he went and ended up shooting it, “knowing absolutely nothing about photography”. Skip to today and Isaac is a visual creative who runs Sabotage Studios, a photography studio, hire house and filming location in Shoreditch. Echoing the community skating provided for him and his working-class background, Isaac created Sabotage Supports, a programme opening the studio up to young people for free use. The studio is also a space for community and hanging out - Phuggers recently held their launch party there.
He ends the conversation telling me about the real camaraderie in skating. “I owe everything to finding a skateboard - it taught me about respecting other people, being inclusive in a community. I’ve got a lot to thank skate culture for. Without it, I wouldn’t have had the same influences. It gives a lot out and teaches you about culture. Yeah… Cheesy. ”