Header / Ryan Stanway Front Krooks in a video screencap I shamelessly stole from Instagram
If you’re a Coventry local, you are likely aware of the spot at the Train Station – the car park there has a perfect little rectangle of flat ground that locals have quickly turned into a DIY haven for the scene. The spot itself features a pair of slappy curbs and a high curb/ledge, but the donated obstacles include a variety of ledges, a kicker and a quarter pipe.
This spot was discovered/claimed sometime during the winter – there are limited undercover spots in Coventry and honestly there isn’t much to skate when it’s raining around these parts. This, combined with the scene’s previous city centre home at the Herbert Art Gallery becoming a building site as Coventry University renovate this area of their campus, forced people to rally around the train station spot.
Where the train station spot is was supposed to be allocated for motorcycle parking, but (and this was discovered by skateboarders getting mugged at the spot) the area is awful for security and motorbikes would most likely have been stolen. Not to mention it seems like motorbikes park for free, which seems like an oversight by the car park operators considering the cost of parking there in a car.
And so, the space became a bit of a DIY plaza. For just over half a year the locals have been using the space, and the core skateboarders in Coventry have been using the space respectfully, and keeping themselves to themselves. The problem is that others have gravitated toward the space, and started littering, tagging the walls with shit graffiti, and generally giving all of us a bad reputation.
Now: I ain’t stupid. I’m willing to admit that skateboarders squatting in a public car park and claiming a space for their own as an unofficial skatepark is not a situation that can last forever. It was inevitable that someone in a suit would come along and present a litany of reasons why this skateboarding thing just simply cannot continue here on our property. There are flats next to the building: the residents were gonna get us booted eventually.
Video / Liam O'Neill brings one of his signature boneless moves to the train station
Having said that – the litter, the graffiti and the anti-social behaviour that was brought into the space by non-skaters probably brought that inevitability into reality sooner than it needed to happen. There are tons of examples of DIY skateboarding spaces being a benefit to the local community and residents getting behind it: Bournbrook DIY being a crown jewel example. Bournbrook survived because the undesirable dickheads who usually get us booted from spots were not welcome to the skatepark at all.
That’s not me having a go at the locals who skate there. They have been more than vocal about not wanting these people hanging out at our spot. In Cov we have spent years trying to boot littering, shit-tagging, anti-social greebos, goths and chavs from spots we have fought hard to secure (and even from skateparks). These groups are always the people who cause the problems that stop us getting new skateparks – their actions are blamed on us, when we are literally there to just skate and nothing else.
The crux of the problem isn’t that non-skaters who gravitate to our spaces exist to begin with, it’s that councils simply do not give a shit about these people (us included) and have failed to provide meaningful places for any of us to go for years. When we find a space to call our own due to their complete inability to cater to young people, the council roll in and complain and boot us, and then we find the next space, and so on and so on forever and ever.
I’m not gonna sit here and campaign for a space for graffiti, or education over “how to use a fucking bin” or giving anti-social kids some form of purpose so they aren’t making us look like dog shit, but what I will repeat for what seems like the 50,000th time for anyone at the council reading this:
COVENTRY NEEDS A NEW SKATEBOARDER DESIGNED AND LED SKATEPARK FACILITY NOW
No matter how many times you treat skateboarding as some anti-social unwanted nuisance, it will not go away. There are hundreds of kids picking up skateboarding. Skate lessons are so in demand that instructors are struggling to put on enough lessons to cater to the number of kids doing it. Skateboarding is now an official Olympic sport, and when the Olympics return next year and Sky Brown inspires a whole new generation of young skaters, they are going to get bored of the shit skateparks in Coventry and end up at whatever the next DIY street hub ends up being. To paraphrase a piece of Maverick Skateparks documentation I got eyes on back in my own skatepark campaigning days: If your city doesn’t have a fit for purpose skatepark, then IT IS A SKATEPARK.
So, when skateboarders tell you that Coventry’s skateparks are no good, that the only good place to skate is a rectangle of tarmac inside a car park designed for parking motorbikes with no security: the wrong reply is “You have a skatepark” or “We will put in a bylaw to stop skateboarding in the city centre” or “If you want good facilities you must travel out of Coventry”. These answers are not good enough. We’ve heard them before. We ain’t having it.
This game of whack-a-mole the council keep playing to get us shifted off skate spots is not the fault of non-skaters who are also looking for a space to call their own, it’s the fault of a council who have time and time again failed to acknowledge our skate scene, and collaborate and communicate with us. This is a council that, when presented with a perfect, golden opportunity to provide a landmark skatepark for the Midlands that puts every other city nearby to shame in the War Memorial Ramp Renovation campaign, or the Coventry Skatepark Project, (or one of the handful of skatepark projects I wafted by the council before that), the council would rather use our own efforts to supply a space they have failed to give us as a reason to deny us anything.
Video / IT'S SLAPPY HOUR FOLKS. Dan Masser Front Noseslides the train station slappy curb.
Coventry City Council/Network Rail/Whoever is in charge of moving us off this spot, or the next, or the next – you can kick us off this spot, and you can keep kicking us off anywhere we end up, but the truth is that you all know the reason we are skating these places. You all know that we have collectively spent almost 2 decades campaigning for a skatepark that would provide somewhere safer and better than a square of tarmac in a car park. This is a scene that lacks a central hub, the Coventry skate scene is effectively drifting from precarious spot to precarious spot, and the very people who could help find a central home for the scene want an Olympic sport labelled as “anti-social behaviour” because it’s easier to lazily treat us as undesirables rather than finally do something that matches the bluster and hype you gave yourself for City Of Culture.
What was happening at the Train spot – THAT was culture. THAT was a community pulling together to give themselves what you will not. THAT was Coventry Skateboarding doing what it does best. And THAT will keep on happening across the city centre unless Coventry City Council rectifies their woeful history of skatepark facilities. The debate over the train station spot isn’t a debate – it’s a demand. Coventry needs somewhere good for skateboarders to call home, and it needs it now.
The Terrible Company 