Elsewhere by Neil Macdonald review: 'a fitting tribute to golden age of UK skateboarding'
Neil Macdonald conducted hundreds of hours of interviews to capture the spirit of the developing UK skate scene, writes Roger Cox
Every sporting subculture has its historians, its archivists, its record-keepers. The more niche the sport, though, the more essential these people become. Football, golf, rugby, tennis, cricket... well-established sports like these all have hundreds if not thousands of enthusiasts, both amateur and professional, who have devoted years of their lives to squirrelling away programmes, photographs, newspaper and magazine articles and other ephemera. But not all sports leave such an elephantine archival footprint. Case in point: skateboarding.
Nowadays, thanks to the upload-everything culture of the internet, barely a wobbly suburban boardslide goes down without some sort of digital documentation taking place. In the pre-internet era, however, when skateboarding was at a key point in its development here in the UK, social media wasn’t even a twinkle in Mark Zuckerberg’s eye. Instead, the culture was largely recorded in perilously perishable print, via glossy magazines and rough ’n’ ready homemade ’zines, and on limited-release VHS tapes and DVDs.
All of which makes Elsewhere, the new book from Glasgow-based writer and historian Neil Macdonald, an absolute treasure trove. As an aspiring skater in the late 1980s, Macdonald’s first skateboard mag purchases were Issue 1 of Skate Action, in September 1988, followed by the October 1988 editions of Skateboard! and RaD. From then on, according to a 2023 interview on the Slam City skateboard blog, he started “religiously” buying UK publications as they came out. As a result of this, and his acquisition of all kinds of other ephemera, he had an enormous archive to draw on for this epic, glossy, 400-page, 2.1kg doorstopper of a project.
The book’s title is both a nod to the fact that security guards looking to move groups of skaters on will often tell them to skate “elsewhere” and also a hint that the skate culture being documented is not just that of the obvious hotspots like the Undercroft at London’s Southbank Centre (although these feature too) but places typically considered peripheral. As if to prove the point, the first chapter alone features images from Newcastle, and the Isle of Wight, not to mention Broughty Ferry and Arbroath.
As per its subtitle, Elsewhere charts the development of the UK skateboard scene between 1987 and 2002. The decision to start in ’87, Macdonald has said, was because that was the year when (in the wake of Back to the Future the previous year) skating in the UK saw a huge spike in popularity. This was also a point, Macdonald argues, at which the UK started to develop its own distinctive skateboarding culture. In the introduction to Elsewhere, he writes “suddenly skateboarding wasn’t so much about observing the American superstars as it was about what you could do with the kerb outside your house and some ‘borrowed’ ply... The generation that started at the end of the 1980s, and whose focus was almost entirely on street skating – and not travelling to a ramp, getting padded up and waiting in line until it was your turn – changed the direction of not only skateboarding but culture itself, globally.
The end point he has selected, meanwhile, is the moment at which both the internet and big money seemed to take over. In his foreword to the book, the London-based skate snapper Wig Worland writes that, by the early 2000s “the commodification of skateboarding that had begun in 1995 with the advent of the X-Games had taken a wider grip... By the early to mid-2000s I sensed something was off and pulled back, and I had essentially stopped shooting skateboarding by 2005.”
Having pinpointed the golden age of UK skateboarding, then, Macdonald sets out to catalogue it at the rate of one chapter per year. He could simply have done this by reproducing bucketloads of gold-dust archival material for each 12-month period, and this book would still have been a worthwhile project. However, he has gone above and beyond, conducting hundreds of hours of interviews with many of the main players from the period, from athletes and photographers to key creatives and industry insiders.
There’s no omniscient narrator to explain what’s going on to non-skaters, just one verbatim quote after another, but in the context of the book that makes sense. Macdonald isn’t trying to craft some clever academic thesis here – his interest is in primary sources, first-person accounts of what went down as told by the people who were there, and what great stories some of them are. Scottish readers will doubtless enjoy some of the anecdotes from homegrown pros John Rattray and Colin Kennedy, and there are some wonderful images of them both, the former drifting his board effortlessly down a handrail outside the Mitchell Library in Glasgow in 1996, the latter airborne in Bristo Square in Edinburgh the same year. There are also eye-opening tales of cut-throat rivalry between competing skate mags; of violence in skate shops and at skate events; of smashed-up hotel rooms and of one very dramatic police chase. Nobody involved seemed to make much money in the end, but these guys were a far cooler, grittier embodiment of the expression “move fast and break things” than the tech bros will ever be.
Elsewhere: The Story of UK Skateboarding 1987-2002, by Neil Macdonald, Batsford, £50
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