Indie Spotlight: LCB Mile End
HUCK meets the skate shop helping local kids get their shred on.
More like this...
Trains rumble just a few feet overhead, but strangely all that can be heard as we sit in the upstairs lounge of LCB skate shop in Mile End, east London are the tunes from the sound system and the pop of decks from the skate park out front. Fitted into the arches of Mile End’s graffiti-covered, brick railway bridge, this independent shop enviably looks out on a concrete plaza of ledges, bowls and hips, and is very much at the heart of the skate community in this corner of the capital.
“Every skateboarder in London knows when it rains you can’t skate,” laments Carl Richardson, the shop manager, about the not-so-skate-friendly weather. “So opening an indoor park that’s going to be dry all year around, and free, means that anyone can come down and try it out. It just keeps skateboarding alive through the winter.”
And so, in recent months, the team at LCB have been building an indoor skate park in the railway arch next door, offering free, shredful sanctuary from the often relentless rain and cold. “The shop opened to bring as much as we could to the community around here and the kids. That was the path behind opening the arch with the ramps in it,” explains Carl.
So as of December 2011, the indoor park is now up and running thanks to Tower Hamlets Council’s backing in conjunction with its Urban Adventure Base programme that provides out of hours clubs and activities for young people.
The arches
But making this small park of a mini ramp, bank ramp, ledge and mini-er mini ramp was a team effort with LCB owners Mark and Pete Lindsell, LCB skate director Bryce Campbell, pro skater Chris Oliver and Rodney Clark from King Ramps all pitching in to build it – albeit with a little outside help. “We had literally 30 kids from the park coming in and out putting screws in,” says Carl.
The shop now offers frequent free skate lessons for the next generation of urban guerrillas and have gained the facilities to host activities for local kids including the Skate and Create club. “ [It] involves kids printing their own boards, printing t-shirts, making videos, taking trips to different parks around the city,” explains Carl. “It’s just about getting as many kids involved with it as possible really. […] In this area, there is not a great deal of money that the council puts toward smaller activities. The council has finally realised that there are a lot of people out there that don’t play football.”
With all the concrete that’s been flying up around London over the past three years — including Clissold Bowls in Stoke Newington, Victoria Park in Hackney and Mile End itself — it seems councils across the board are starting to get the message as well. What’s more, it seems they realise that metal skate parks built by construction workers don’t cut the mustard anymore and it’s time to get the skaters themselves involved.
“All the old parks were put together by builders and everything was almost unskatable,” says Carl. “Now everything is built by companies like Gravity and Wheelscape, who are all skateboarders. So, everything that’s involved, except the financial side of it, is done by skateboarders which should be the only way to do it.”
The ramps
What it's made for
Subscribe to HUCK for six issues
Only £21 (UK) / £44 (EU) / £59 (Rest of the World).
Indie Spotlight: LCB Mile End (text) by Shane Herrick is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.
Comments (1)
Please note: Your comment may be held in moderation for approval by an administrator to prevent spamming. This usually doesn't take long, please be patient.