The rise of the outdoor’s punks

There’s a photograph that lives in my head. I think it was taken somewhere on the King’s Road in the ​’70s. Black-and-white. A punk, maybe 19, daring the lens, offering two fingers by way of a combative salute. His Mohican looks superglued stiff, I imagine it’s dyed some garish shade of pink. There’s a safety pin piercing his nose, or it could be his cheek; the image I conjure is ambiguous on that point. Maybe it was on a tourist postcard that read something like ​‘Welcome to London’. Maybe it was staged, performing the expected cliché of punk. It doesn’t really matter. It’s what I picture when I hear the word ​‘punk’, more so even than the music itself.

The image comes with a smell of snakebite and black, stale cigarettes and glue sniffed from a plastic Tesco bag (again, imagined). It reminds me of two people I once saw as a kid sitting at the back of the terraces at White Hart Lane, not interested in the football, belligerent with more than a whiff of provocation and a refusal to apologise. It’s the attitude that sticks with me: a generation rejecting the life mapped out for them and choosing instead to build something dirty, purposely obnoxious and defiantly theirs. A culture assembled from whatever was at hand. DIY not so much as an aesthetic but as a necessity. A movement born from frustration, exclusion and the conviction that if the establishment didn’t want them, they’d build their own place to exist.

It was shaped by a set of social conditions, economic decline and high unemployment created a disillusioned youth resenting the establishment and the fading idealism of the ​’60s. Punk wasn’t just music or fashion, it was a rejection, a refusal to ask permission. Favouring community and new voices it ran on the idea that anyone could give it a go: start a collective, knock together a fanzine, maybe open a venue or form a band, why not? No previous experience necessary. Rules and the establishment were there to be broken. Culture no longer belonged only to the experts or the institutions, it sat in the hands of young working-class kids and art-school students. The only qualification needed was the willingness to give it a go, and not give too much of a fuck. 

Sociologist Dick Hebdige argued at the time that all subcultures inevitably decline, what was once shocking to the public gets diluted and sanitised then sold back to the masses, the subversion castrated into just another trend. Punk as we know it lives on in basements, music and annual festivals, but where do we now point to see tradition and authority being challenged?

The outdoors has long been imagined as a place of counterculture. Dirtbag climbers roughing it, maverick surfers or daring mountaineers – all ​“windswept and interesting”, as Glaswegian comedian Billy Connolly would phrase it. The mythology is one of freedom and independence with rule-breakers who dared to do their own thing. The reality is often quite different.

Adventure is the vein that runs through it, but for all its misty-eyed romance, much of organised outdoor culture has become one of the most codified recreational pursuits imaginable. It’s built on clubs and organisations structured around class and race. The Alpine Club founded in 1857 – the longest standing of its kind – would actively exclude all but wealthy gentlemen with a shared political outlook. In 2023 a report by the Wildlife and Countryside Link, (an environment and wildlife coalition in England comprising of 97 organisations for the protection of nature) quoted: ​“Racist colonial legacies continue to frame nature in the UK as a ​‘white space.’” This was disputed by the then Home Secretary Suella Braverman.

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The outdoors has qualifications and handbooks with an inherited language of expertise. It feels almost too old to take cultural risks, preferring instead to pass down custom and ritual from one generation to the next. ​“Earn your stripes” and ​“pay your dues”. Make sure you ​“leave no trace” and for heaven’s sake ​“stick to the path”. A significant amount of that (safety, equipment, environmental protection) serves a genuine purpose. Much of the rest simply reinforces the idea that there’s a ​‘correct’ way to outdoors.

It’s built a culture where legitimacy is often measured in accreditation, where owning the right product from a certain brand is rewarded with a subtle nod. Experience or affiliation with the right institution is critical to acceptance, sometimes it’s offset with the amount of suffering you’ve had to endure and is worn as a badge of honour. It’s rife with certifications, some of them gruelling to obtain, requiring years of proving you’ve spent enough time in the right places, following the right prescribed principles to then be rewarded with a few letters next to your Linkedin profile; letters only the initiated will care to recognise.

None of this is inherently bad, all scenes have their social mores and I’d suggest that protecting an established culture that has learnt from its mistakes and has developed around a set of core principles is important, but it does leave parts of the outdoor establishment with the faint aroma of pipe smoke and oak panelling: respectable, knowledgeable, and smugly convinced there’s only one ​‘proper’ way of doing things – theirs.

The most exciting thing happening in the outdoors isn’t a new extreme sport. It’s a new way of outdooring.

Every established culture eventually creates the conditions for its own rebellion. The irony is that while these institutions have been busy preserving their traditions, a different culture has been taking shape around them, built on participation rather than qualification, on invitation rather than permission. It’s starting to look familiar.

A mix of algorithmic burnout and a post-pandemic hunger for real human and nature connection has grown the desire for genuine belonging, while economic uncertainty and political polarisation have sharpened an appetite for a restorative space in the wild. The industry’s sporadic attempts to get to grips with diversity beyond token gestures has reached a point where people have simply decided to do their own thing.

Collectively, it’s starting to strip away decades of secret language and waxing techniques, giving rise to a world where a publication like Click – A FLINTA* Climbing Zine (Female, Lesbian, Intersex, Non-binary, Trans and Agender) can be viable. ​“I made this zine because I was missing FLINTA* people in the outdoors and wanted to give them a platform to also publish their stories. Because we are out there and have much to tell,” says Malin Röllin, creator of Click.

Another is community group Soul Trail Wellbeing, a Black-led non-profit working to reduce health inequalities and improve racial equity outdoors, can exist. Leanne Wharton, its founder, explains, ​“I founded Soul Trail during the pandemic while working as a therapist. Being in nature made a huge positive impact on my wellbeing, but I noticed how few people looked like me and how exclusive outdoor support was – and so Soul Trail was born.” 

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Small independent brands are everywhere. So are diverse trail-running clubs such as Trail Sisters, who focus on female only events, as well as community-level organisers Black Canary out of Berlin, and a host of digital creators waiting to tell you the in-vogue silhouette of hiking-inspired trousers to wear this season.

You could argue these communities have simply just discovered the outdoors and will eventually fall into step. I’d suggest instead that they’ve just stopped waiting for institutions to solve the problem of belonging. A decade ago, the conversation hinged on representation within existing organisations. I’ve sat through numerous meetings on this subject yet nothing much has changed. In its absence entirely new spaces have been built to fill the void.

They have generally been created by people with little to no interest in logging hikes for months on end or are particularly excited by films about men battling the forces of nature and getting frostbite. They’re people building their own institutions, DIY-style, without the usual gatekeeper elitism and there are loads of them. Where governing bodies and brands once dictated where, when and how things happen, third space social groups in the digital world are now mobilising communities right under the incumbents’ noses, despite the industry’s long-standing formalities.

The outdoors hasn’t become more important because nature has changed in some way. Its importance has shifted because modern life has. And it poses a new question: not who’s entering the outdoors, but what does today’s outdoors even mean? What was once a testing ground is fast becoming a place for healing and self-expression, where sport is often nowhere to be seen.

Subcultures are a form of resistance with their own visual cues, remember our mohawked friend? This new version of outdoors comes with its own semiotics: the Salomon XT‑6 and the Arc’teryx Beta, a vintage fleece from Depop that once belonged to someone’s dad or a patched-up micro-puffer that says you care about the environment. Signifiers that help tell everyone you belong to something bigger, regardless of whether you know what you’re doing or where you’re going. Crucially, this technical clothing often gets used entirely out of context, in ways that run counter to its original purpose. More nuanced and less provocative than punk’s penchant for bondage courtesy of Dame Vivienne Westwood, perhaps, but cultural style staples all the same, a fashion that announces your outdoor intentions from the top step of the London Underground.

When culture moves, brands notice, and in an age when outdoor brands typically need over a year to get from product design to retail, their struggle to keep pace with today’s fast-moving cultural landscape is both exciting and difficult. Getting closer to the source and understanding shifting ambitions to stay legitimate matters more than ever. The culture is starting to outpace the industry which we can see is now forced to follow, much as record labels eventually followed punk.

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Can this really be called counterculture, or is it just a flash in the pan unbothered by its own consumerism, happy for companies to repackage it as long as they ​‘keep it real’? Look to other places and the answer is probably yes. Hip hop has had a huge influence on luxury fashion. Skateboarding and sneaker culture have been great bedfellows, even graffiti artists can sometimes be seen exhibiting in high-end galleries. All have navigated a commercial space while keeping it on point, retaining integrity while rejecting the old hierarchies and holding on to a DIY ethos where expertise doesn’t outshine participation.

How conscious today’s burgeoning outdoor communities are of what they’re doing is up for debate. Overall, overthrowing the outdoor industry probably isn’t high on the agenda, what they are doing however – without the permissions of the industry – is remaking it and seeing where it ends up. Perhaps that was punk’s aim the whole time. Hebdige argued that subcultures will ultimately be assimilated to the mainstream, and history suggests he’s right. But in doing so culture also changes.

Let’s go back to the King’s Road photo. It’s entirely possible the photograph doesn’t exist at all – that it’s an amalgam of documentaries, record sleeves and stories that have assembled themselves into an image that only exists in my head. Yet its attitude is very real. Who were those two fingers raised at? I used to think it was authority, to ​‘the man’. Now I’m more inclined to think they were pointed at other like-minded rebels, a silent reminder that the institutions probably don’t represent you, so don’t waste your life trying to be accepted by them when you can simply build something different. Looking at the outdoors today it feels that more people are starting to do exactly that.

Phil Young is the founder of the Outsiders Project. Follow him on Instagram.

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