Eating concrete with London Skate Mums

“I guess it’s a wet session,” says Jardena Templeton as we snake our way around fresh puddles and into the belly of London’s famed Southbank Undercroft skatepark. It’s midday on a Monday, and the graffitied concrete cave is being pressure washed, which Templeton says ​“sucks” for the purposes of the session, but ​“at least it won’t smell like pee”.

The 37-year-old mother of two was born and raised in New Zealand, but lives in London with her husband and two kids and works as an interior stylist. Skating is something she doesn’t have time for. But like the other 100 plus women in the London Skate Mums club, she makes time for it. 

Three more skate mums strut into the park through the back entrance, shouting various iterations of ​“What is THIS!?” at the slick wet concrete. With the wind on their side, they look like a convincing ad for Vans, Santa Cruz. A few minutes later, another handful of mums roll up. 

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Five years on from the group’s 2021 genesis, the women are respected members of London’s skate community – a few of them are even preparing for their official debuts to the scene: appearing in Southbank’s Skate 50 exhibition, which runs from 30 April to 21 June in the adjacent Southbank Centre. 

Over the past half century, the Undercroft has become legendary – it’s the oldest steadily-used skatepark in the world. Community activism kept it from succumbing to several closure threats over the years (once in the early 2000s, and most notably in 2013, when the Long Live Southbank movement emerged). Originally constructed in the 1960s as a pedestrian underpass, the space’s smooth surfaces and shelter from London’s favourite weather made it a magnet for the city’s skate scene. The skaters of England’s capital had claimed it for themselves by 1973, and now, the name alone is an iconographic shorthand for British street and skate culture. 

The exhibition will mark 50 years of skating under Queen Elizabeth Hall, where the skate mums are hosting today’s session. Skate 50 is set to tell the story of the space’s inception and legacy through photos, video and audio spanning the 50 years that it’s been a beloved riding park. And its modern history wouldn’t be complete without spotlighting the mothers who shred there. 

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“Being able to feel comfortable skating somewhere as iconic as the Southbank is incredible,” says Templeton. ​“There’s a lot of history here, there’s a lot of weight to that.” The fact that London Skate Mums gives middle-aged women with children the opportunity to show up and belong in a place like the Undercroft is the club’s greatest success, Templeton explains.

But the group’s visibility in the city’s skate community was hard-earned over the years, both because the skate scene can be exclusive, as 56-year-old member Esther Sayers explains, and because as a middle-aged woman, it takes time to work up the confidence to enter a skatepark – a traditional hotspot for youth culture – with confidence. 

“Women and girls are keen to be in spaces where their presence is legitimised. And they find it harder to be there if they don’t feel that welcome. It’s a cultural change that we need,” says Sayers, whose academic research work focuses on British skate culture. 

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London Skate Mums technically began in 2020 as a small WhatsApp group chat. COVID catalysed a love of the sport for many in the UK; some estimates say between 70,000 and 90,000 people took up skateboarding during the pandemic. By 2021, Templeton had joined the club and created an Instagram page so other mums could find them more easily – and the London Skate Mums were born. 

Now, the group gathers weekly on Monday nights for skate meet-ups at a beginner-friendly indoor skatepark, which are focused on progression. Biweekly sessions take place midday during a weekday, and are mostly attended by mums who stay at home or who have flexible work schedules. And once a month, Templeton organises their main event: Skate Club, which involves a coach and focuses on getting mums comfortable in the wider skate community. This means learning skate etiquette, building confidence and pushing yourself to learn something new with the help of the coach. 

Today in the Undercroft, it’s obvious that for these women, the club is somehow divorced from the rest of everyday life. There is no mention of kids, work, where each of them came from that day or what’s next on their schedules. ​“As a mother, your timing is quite restricted. It is a luxury to have a morning for yourself,” says Agnieszka ​‘Aga’ Wood. They arrive with boards in hand, and those who wear pads or scrape guards are already kitted-out. No time to waste. Just wheels thrown to the ground like cards on a table – and only one question is asked over the resonant echo: ​“What are you working on today?” 

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Some of the mums are just learning to push, rolling from one confetti-coloured wall of the park to the next, while others practice their ollies or mourn the dysfunction of the recently pressure-washed banks. Helen Bickford, 39, is pushing through the ​“jelly legs” and practicing her kick turns, while Shushan Ulubabyan, 41, and Wood, 51, work on launches. Inês Dias-Francis, 38, is still getting comfortable forward-rolling. 

No matter what stage you’re at, says Bickford, ​“the hype is real”. On a skatepark date with her BMX rider husband, Bickford realised that the mums’ space was special. ​“I started skating with him and I was like, ​‘What is this? Where’s the hype?’” With the mums, she explains, the vibe is electric. The women share a mutual understanding of what it means for each of them to have shown up. One mum’s win is everyone’s win, and progress feels inevitable. 

This emotional safety net is central to success for all the mums. ​“There’s an assumption that skateboarding is mainly for men and boys,” says Sayers. ​“And yes, the numbers do back that up, but not to the extent that people think. I think it’s still a bit invisible, this underbelly of women and girls who are so actively involved.”

And the underbelly in question – contrary to depictions in popular culture of skater girls as rebellious teens – is not a monolith. The reasons why each skate mum shows up are varied. Some, like Templeton, grew up skating, working in skate shops and deeply enmeshed in the culture – it just took a marriage-and-kids hiatus before she found her way back to the sport. For others, like Bickford, skating has been a lifelong dream. ​“It was something I just always wanted to do,” she explains, recalling the summer days she spent watching her male friends from the skatepark sidelines to a soundtrack of Incubus and Jurassic 5. ​“I just never felt like it was an option for me.” Dias-Francis says simply: ​“Skate Mums is cheaper than therapy.”

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For Bickford, joining the group was a yellow brick half-pipe back to autonomy. ​“When you become a mum, you sort of lose part of yourself,” she says. ​“There was a lot of sadness about, ​‘Is this what my life is?’ I love my children. Hated my job. COVID happened. I was just thinking: ​‘What can I do?’”

Templeton’s return to skating was spurred by an opposite experience: becoming a mother gave her skate ​“superpowers” that helped her break into what had felt like an exclusive boys club in her youth. ​“You go through this massive change, bodily, mentally, everything,” says Templeton. ​“It’s not really about you, and that’s really freeing. When it came to skating, I just didn’t really give a shit anymore.”

On Monday nights, Templeton explains, there’s an acceptance in the group’s shared understanding of the ​“life costs” it took for each of them to show up that day – on a lunch break, in an early morning after school drop-off, or an evening when they’ve had to sneak away. ​“When we get here, there’s a shorthand. We know what it took to get here. We’re like, ​‘Let’s get down to business.’”

Follow London Skate Mums on Instagram for more information and future meetups.

Sydney Lobe is a freelance journalist. Follow her on Instagram.

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