Bros and broken bones: 25 years of London’s skate scene in photos

In the late 1980s, when James Edson was a nine-year-old grow­ing up in Sheffield, his cousin gave him a present that would change his life for­ev­er: a small skate­board adorned with a vivid, psy­che­del­ic pat­tern. Edon took to it like a duck to water, bring­ing it along to his local skatepark where he would study the old­er boys in acid washed jeans pulling ollies and kickflips.

“It was one of those weird tie dye things from the 70s,” Edson recalls. ​“I wasn’t into foot­ball and all that kind of thing, and skat­ing was dif­fer­ent to team sports – a bit more out­side the box. So it made sense, and I looked up to the guys around my area who looked cool and what­ev­er with how they dressed.”

When he turned 16, he picked up a cam­era for the first time and began to take pic­tures of his friends at the skatepark and beyond. But it was when he moved to Lon­don and joined Palace Way­ward Boys Choir (PWBC), from which the now icon­ic fash­ion brand would be born, that his pas­sion ful­ly kicked into gear. In the pre-smart­phone era of con­stant con­nec­tion, he would take the pic­tures and have them print­ed him­self – the phys­i­cal pho­tographs becom­ing a means of hold­ing onto the mem­o­ries, as well as for his friends.

“I always liked film,” Edson says. ​“It was before the days of Insta­gram as well, so it wasn’t share­able unless you did some­thing with it. So peo­ple would have makeshift art shows and that kind of thing, which is cool – that DIY aspect of things.”

After build­ing up an exten­sive archive from the past quar­ter cen­tu­ry and found­ing East London’s (now sad­ly closed) Way­ward Gallery, sev­er­al of Edson’s favourite pic­tures are being pre­sent­ed in his new­ly pub­lished pho­to­book Rab­bit Hole, made in part­ner­ship with MPK Stu­dios. Fea­tur­ing chipped teeth, hang­ing out at London’s icon­ic South­bank Skatepark, friends in base­ball caps and bag­gy jeans lean­ing up against bol­lards and unex­pect­ed trips to the hos­pi­tal – the book is a cel­e­bra­tion of the friend­ship, fun and most of all com­mu­ni­ty that he fos­tered through skat­ing over the years.

“I think the run­ning theme [in skate com­mu­ni­ties], wher­ev­er you go, is that peo­ple see like-mind­ed­ly,” he says. ​“There’s quite a sup­port­ive net­work and it’s pos­i­tive. There were times when it wasn’t quite like that. I think it was a kind of defen­sive mech­a­nism because you’d get bul­lied and or get called a ​‘grunger’, but that seems to have changed.”

The book also fea­tures a quirk when it comes to look­ing at the pic­tures. Each pho­to is rotat­ed 45 degrees from the pre­vi­ous, so the read­er will rotate the book as they flick through its pages, lit­er­al­ly tak­ing them down a spi­ralling rab­bit hole of pho­tographs. ​“You can read it both ways, so it spi­rals from front to back, back to front,” he explains.

Oth­er cities also make appear­ances, with Edson hav­ing trav­elled to sev­er­al of the world’s biggest urban jun­gles to skate – from Paris, Berlin, New York and beyond. ​“All the trav­el­ling was the best thing, you get to see so much oth­er stuff as well as skate­board­ing,” he says. That’s the heart of skat­ing for Edson: it’s not nec­es­sar­i­ly who can pull the most rota­tions on a ramp, but shar­ing those impor­tant moments with friends and explor­ing the world.

“Skat­ing has always been in the back­ground for me,” he reflects. ​“I always pre­ferred doc­u­ment­ing it, meet­ing peo­ple, trav­el­ling, dif­fer­ent expe­ri­ences. Those are the main things, really.”

Rab­bit Hole by James Edson is pub­lished by MPK Stu­dio.

Fol­low Isaac on Twit­ter.

Enjoyed this arti­cle? Fol­low Huck on Twit­ter and Insta­gram.