This is a nice touch. The Southbank Centre is celebrating its 75th anniversary this year, but it has also found a moment to celebrate 50 years of skateboarding in the Undercroft of the Queen Elizabeth Hall with an exhibition of films, audio, photos and boards. Given the Southbank is making a big deal about youth subcultures, the difficult relationship it has had with the skating community in the past could easily have been a bum note. Instead, it is bringing skateboarding in the Undercroft into the wider celebrations without avoiding the past. In fact, the battles with the institution form the central narrative here.
Predominantly, the exhibition showcases short films by Winstan Whitter, Dan Magee, Lev Tanju and Jack Brooks, which tell the history of skaters here, along with animation by Sofia Negri and atmospheric audio by Beatrice Dillon. There is also photography, a selection of often battered boards and a timeline around the walls.
A community set in concrete
As Whitter’s Wheels of Time film shows, skateboarding began in the States in the 1960s, a way for city kids to have a taste of the booming surf culture. Meanwhile over here in 1963, work started on a new arts complex next to the Royal Festival Hall. Designed by the GLC and avant-garde architects Archigram, the Queen Elizabeth Hall was built — for reasons no one on the film can fully understand — with the Undercroft at its base, a space that had a futurist flourish to match the brutalism elsewhere. It was a concrete expanse with banks and rails and as the skateboarding craze hit the UK, London skaters spotted its enticing prospects; the first use of the Undercroft for skating was in 1973. By 1976, skater Jeremy Henderson was reinventing skating within this space, performing tricks at the highest point up a bank before coming back down. Soon after, at the behest of a Southbank skater, Ben Howard made a skateboard called the White Lightning and launched the first UK skate company, Benjyboards.
As the films show, it went on to become the “home of British skateboarding”, not simply a place where skating innovations like kickflips could happen — alongside BMXs and rollerskating — but a hub for a community of young people who had found a place to belong.
But of course, skateboarding here was never an “official” activity as such, as while skateparks cropped up all over London into the 1980s, Southbank security were charged with deterring skateboarders — and homeless people in what was known as Cardboard City. Decades of wrangling between the skate community and the Southbank began. Plans were made to turn the Undercroft into a retail park and cafés as the 1990s hit, and skateboarding was banned outright at certain times, with dirty tactics like pebbles being strewn across surfaces employed. As the skateboarders from the time remember though, they had the imagination, determination and heart to work around or indeed legally object whenever the place was under threat.
The fight for their right to roll
As the 1990s went on, skateboarding became mainstream cool, thanks to the popularity of skate brands in fashion and world-famous icons like Tony Hawk. And yet into the 2000s the Undercroft remained threatened. Under artistic director Jude Kelly, the Southbank made concerted efforts to redevelop the space, reaching a peak in 2013 when new plans were announced for a “festival wing” which would involve the closure of the Undercroft permanently, and shops and restaurants put there instead. An organisation was formed called Long Live Southbank, which campaigned and petitioned and won the support of mayor Boris Johnson, which eventually quashed the plans in 2014.
It all makes for a compelling watch. Something of a David vs Goliath story, but where David is a Situationist, reclaiming a useless urban space and turning it into a theatre of skill and fun. It’s hard to see what the problem has ever been — only the usual stuffy white British Establishment sniffing at a multicultural gathering of youths… who, shock horror, might smoke a bit of weed.
Walking out of the exhibition, it paints the current scene of skateboarders in a different light. And it is a real mix of ages, genders, races; all sharing space, respecting each other and expressing themselves. This is what London is all about, as much as any grand cultural offering in the venues upstairs. What a great move to put on this free exhibition; make sure you seek it out the next time you’re down there. As one skateboarder says of the Undercroft: “This is our second home… and more valuable than having a f***ing Starbucks here.”
