Ride Coventry: 1999-2023

Coventry Skateboarding has suffered a massive loss, with long time skater owned shop Ride closing its doors. Honestly, this is a massive blow to the scene, and I felt like I wanted to write some overly sentimental guff about the shop, and the sad circumstances surrounding its closure. This is because Ride had a huge hand in supporting what this blog has become, and I wanted to honour what the shop has done for the scene. 

The History Of Ride

Before I start I just need to say this whole bit is kinda just me remembering little bits of info I learned about the shop. It might be inaccurate in some spots. 

Opening its doors in 1999, Ride was sort of a rebrand of Atkins Cycles, a shop that had run in the Atkins family of cycling enthusiasts decades before. Pro cycler Darren Atkins, accompanied by his skateboarding brother Paul Atkins (better known to you and I as Jim The Skin), decided to carry on the legacy using a name that encompassed the wider range of wheeled items the shop would sell and repair. 

By wheeled items I obviously mean that Ride was no longer just a bike shop – they sold skateboards, and became Coventry’s newest skate shop. The popularity of skateboarding at the time had proven successful for the shop, and Jim’s long time presence in the UK skateboarding scene as a mainstay at competitions and skate sessions across the country earned the shop instant support from locals. 

In particular Jim had major contacts with distributors like Power and Shiner, gaining him access to desirable brands such as Death, Independent Trucks, Anti-Hero and Heroin Skateboards. Behind the bike shop exterior, Ride was a core skate shop – and was also uniquely placed to supply the BMX scene in the city as a shop that knew lots about skatepark culture as well as cycling. Where a lot of similar shops struggled to cater to the very different worlds of road cyclists and ratty, dirty skateboarding teens, Ride’s two owners relied on their expertise in both areas to keep clientele from both worlds coming back again and again. 

Ultimately I think we all know that this setup was designed to smartly skirt around the pitfalls of skate shops – when things are good, and skateboarding is popular, skateboard gear flies off the shelves. When skateboarding is out of fashion, business for skate shops can be deadly, with businesses folding if there isn’t the customer base to support them. Ride’s base business relied a lot on bicycle sales and repairs, an area which was more stable and allowed the shop to greatly support Jim’s passion for skateboarding. 

Jim was able to use Ride to support the skate scene in Coventry in many ways, whether it was providing equipment to the sponsored local skaters on the shop’s team, running demos of local riders at the Transport Museum, or the annual Ride end of summer street takeover, which concluded the shop’s summer sale with a massive skate and BMX session in the city centre, with 50+ locals swarming skate spots. Ride were responsible for a lot of various events that would ultimately inspire the events Terribleco would run later on in this blog’s life. 

The shop was a lynchpin of the community: like all good skate shops, it was a place where you could not only buy equipment, but could also just hang out and chat. Over the years, a handful of locals worked for the shop, including Cov OG street legend Gaz Taylor, Cov legend Mark “Frocker” Hewitt (providing much needed website support), and Jim’s son (and legendary Vert skater in his own right) Joe Atkins. Quite often a trip to Ride involved not only browsing and purchasing stuff, but also a chat about new skateparks, watching skate videos Jim was stoked on, and moaning about local skateparks. 

Ride’s involvement in skateparks in the local area spans right back to that very first Coventry skatepark at the War Memorial Park in 2001. Covpark is in no way perfect, but if it wasn’t for Jim the skatepark would have been far worse. Original plans for the park detailed a long strip of tarmac with a metal flatbank at the end. Jim got involved, and roped in other long-time Cov skaters to get the council to build something out of concrete, vastly improving what could have been a skatepark that was dead on arrival. The resulting skatepark proved popular in the years following, and (if you’ve been reading any of the 20th anniversary guff for the blog this year) you all know that Covpark was the place this blog started.

Holbrooks Bowl, being down the road from the shop, also benefited from Jim’s involvement, creating arguably one of the best bowl parks in the midlands at the time. It goes without saying that without Ride’s existence, the skatepark situation in the local area would have been much worse, and these skateparks brought hundreds of new people into our scene over the years. 

And this isn’t even scratching the surface of the rad stuff the shop has done for skateboarding. I haven’t even touched on Blockless Combat (the annual Vert comp at Creation skatepark), the constant support for other skatepark campaigns in the city, letting me stick their logo on most of my DVDs as an unofficial sponsor with no questions asked, asking me to film a tour video for them, prizes given to various competitions across the city and their prestigious place as a defining representative of skateboarding’s impact on youth culture in Coventry, showcased at the Herbert Art Gallery in 2023.

Life After Ride

After being open for 24 years, it’s a shame to see the shop close, especially after everything it has brought to the local scene. I’m sure there’s speculation about why the shop is closing, and despite everything, Ride has weathered many storms previously – competition from chain stores who came and went, a pandemic, popularity in skateboarding waning and returning, and more. 

For the shop to close at this point in time, with skateboarding seemingly more popular than ever (and an Olympic sport, no less), is a sad turn of events – in an alternate reality the shop would survive and go on to prosper, especially with its long local history. 

It isn’t my job to reveal the reasons behind the shop’s closure. If this is something Jim wants to expand on, just meet him at Holbrooks on a Sunday morning and ask him. Unfortunately we’re in a horribly unsettled time, and even with the shop’s smart choices over the items they sell, there are factors a lot of businesses cannot predict. Not to get political, but we live in a time where small, independent businesses like Ride are really getting screwed over by the richest people in our society, including our government. 

What this means is that we, as a community of skateboarders, now have one less skater owner shop on our doorstep. Running a skate shop is no easy feat, especially with huge corporate chain stores like Two Seasons and Skate Hut setting up shop in your town. As we have seen with the likes of Route One muscling in on Lost Art’s turf literally occupying a shop two roads away, chain store skate shops play dirty, and Ride did well to maintain business against Two Seasons and Skate Hut (even with them occupying desirable city centre locations). 

Competition from other skater owned shops has never been a barrier for Ride either – having happily co-existed with other skater owned shops in the local area over the shop’s 24 year run. The difference with competing with another skater owned shop is that the strict rules around what brands each shop can supply in a given location creates a healthy split in product that gives skaters a reason to visit, buy from and support all shops. For example Anti-Hero and Death boards could only be bought from Ride in Coventry, giving the shop a distinct flavour of the type of brands it stocks, depending on your tastes in skateboarding. 

Chain stores often skirt around these rules selling the same brands as core shops for cheaper. In the case of shops like Skate Hut (which entered into a deal with Kong to occupy their shop space in the 2010s), sometimes they only muscle in to try and get their hands on lucrative product contracts for brands like Vans or NIKE SB – in an attempt to dry out access to these brands from local competing stores. In both cases, Ride managed to survive and persevere on multiple occasions, proving how strong the shop was and how loyal the customer base was. 

Without a shop like Ride, no doubt other skater owned shops in the area will step up to fill the void. The shop was well respected across the UK Skateboarding Industry, represented in competitions like the Vans Shop Riot, frequent articles and mentions on magazines like Sidewalk and The Skateboarder’s Companion, and at one point being a shop sponsor for X-Games medalists and skaters from the Olympic Skateboarding squad. They set an intimidating and admirable blueprint for what a skate shop in Coventry is supposed to be. 

What is clear is that if we want shops like Ride to survive, if we want to give them the best chance in an uncertain economic time, we need to pull our weight and start giving them our business. I know I personally have been guilty of ordering more stuff online from other shops than supporting the shops right on my doorstep. 

I’ve been lazy I guess, or gone for convenience when a decent deal turns up. I’m skating a Blast board that I bought directly from their website at the minute, as well as some Film trucks Joxa got for me direct through Power Distribution – back in the day, if I wanted to skate a board or trucks from a certain brand, I would go to Ride, ask Jim about getting it in the shop, and usually he would make it happen. 

Maybe this is just looking at the past through rose tinted glasses, but part of me thinks that there is still a world where a skate shop can be a portal for people to discover new brands and try out new products. Skate shops are still the best equipped people in a local scene to make those connections and bring that product in, and in recent times I kinda forgot that, cutting out the middleman to go direct to the brands and order the product through them in some misguided justification that my money was going straight back to the brands I liked. 

Some people have gone even further down the online rabbit hole, relying on the websites of behemoth chain store retailers, or, even worse, Amazon. Personally I don’t buy any skate stuff through Amazon. I bought some Jessup grip tape through Amazon once and it was actually faulty – weirdly brittle and didn’t stick to my board properly. 

Online purchases have made it so convenient to buy stuff, at the expense of the expert opinion and assistance of another skateboarder who works with these products every day. Even when I am ordering a Blast board directly from the dude who runs the brand, and all my money is still going back into skateboarding, I found I was missing out on all of the extra benefits of visiting a skate shop by shopping this way. 

When I visit a skate shop, I enjoy the conversation, I enjoy browsing, I enjoy watching skate videos, I enjoy learning something from a friend that I didn’t know before. Some of my fondest memories in skateboarding are from visiting a skate shop and interacting with another skateboarder. I captured some of this feeling in the intro for 2012’s Cannonball Holocaust, with Joe Atkins’ intro kinda showing the vibe of going into Ride and spending time chatting with the dudes behind the counter. The loss of Ride is just a reminder of how valuable these moments are to me, and to skateboarding in general. 

What Jim and Darren go on to do next now that the shop is closed is anyone’s guess. Both of them have been doing this a long time, and perhaps this closure coincided with a well deserved break for them both? Following this – Maybe Ride returns as an online retailer? Maybe the shop returns at another physical location in the future? Maybe Joe brings it back after a few years as a fireman? Whatever happens with Ride, Jim and Darren provided a much needed resource for the local skateboarding scene, and it will be missed dearly. 

Thanks to everyone at Ride for 24 years of supporting Coventry skateboarding.