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drinks Monday 1 September 08 Edinburgh Reunion in London
Topping And Butch Hit Leicester Square 26-27 September 08
Brad Skates London
300 skaters race through London every Friday night, weaving in and out of traffic. It's theatre of movement. Brad Hall's in the cast...
You’re having a pint outside a Soho pub, and a horde of 300 roller-bladers sprints round the corner, screaming and blowing whistles, dance music booming (writes Brad Hall). Most of them have big stoopid smiles on their sweaty faces. Whatever they’re up to, they’re having a lot of fun.
If you want to join, it’s free and easy. Just show up at Hyde Park Corner at 8pm on a Wednesday or Friday night. The Friday night skate runs all year, and starts at Wellington Arch (www.thefns.com for the week’s route) – check at 5pm on Fridays if the skate has been called off due to weather. The Wednesday skate is organised by a rival posse, and runs in the summer months. It starts from the Serpentine Road (www.londonskate.com for a map of exactly where).
Each skate winds for about 2 hours through London, covering 15 miles. Each skate is accompanied by a cycle carrying a loud sound-system playing a dance mix. If you want to start slowly, try the Sunday Roller Stroll, starting at 2pm from Queen Elizabeth Gate - where the Serpentine Road meets Hyde Park Corner. Do all these skates, and you’ll easily cover 40 miles in a week—and make a lot of friends.
I joined this urban tribe last year when I returned from living in Hawaii, and needed a way to stay fit. Roller-blading - or, simply, skating - seemed a good option. It is fun and social, not lonely and boring like running on a treadmill. And it doesn’t depend on, say, a squash opponent actually showing up.
The first time, I made it only to the bottom of Constitution Hill before the rear marshals left me behind and told me to practice and try again next week.
Next week, I kept up with the skate for 20 minutes. I got left behind on Oxford Street, out of breath, dripping sweat and wide-eyed with terror. That was from countless close-calls, where I came within millimetres of losing my balance - and falling onto the street in the middle of hundreds of skaters moving cheek-by-jowl at breakneck speed.
For the next few weeks, I made it as far at the half-time rest point. I found each skate mentally exhausting until I gained my legs. It’s due to the constant concentration required to avoid being tripped up by some small grating or pothole.
Working into the scene wasn’t just a matter of learning to skate. My approach was informed by melding with the rave scene in Tokyo in the 1990’s. Both scenes are inclusive rather than exclusive. All you really need to do is show up consistently, and start talking to people. It helps to wear a unique, skating-themed t-shirt (to remember people by - lots of faces).
Sex. The London Skate site calls skating ‘Free, Sexy & Fun’. Citiskate (Friday Night Skate) say skaters ‘have open minds, fit bodies and are good in bed’. Like the rave scene, half the fun is seeing the girls in their boob tubes getting sweaty whilst shaking their booties (they say there are nice things the other way round, too).
Unfortunately, roller boys and babes don’t leave beautiful corpses. Fashion statement that eschews protection (knee pads, helmets) invites injury from the inevitable spills. Like the rave scene, the body count can sometimes rise. But with rave, brain damage tends to be gradual. With inline skating it’s sudden.
Don’t be put off. All sports have hazards, and skating is no more dangerous than skydiving, motorbike racing, alligator wrestling, or knife-throwing.
Once you get speed and skill, you can volunteer to marshal. These are the elite who wear a yellow vest and sprint ahead of the skaters to block off traffic - and bear the wrath of cabbies. They wait while the bubble of skaters goes by, then swoop and sprint to the front. And on
ahead to do it again and again. Marshals have the privileges of skating on the pavement and breaking free from the pack. The downside is that – sometimes - the pack is sometimes like foxhounds gaining on you, and it is embarrassing to be passed. And, of course, as a marshal, you are not allowed to hang out with the sound-bike and the boogying girls.
If you really get into skating, there are all kinds of branches. There’s speed skating, marathons, roller hockey, roller football, free-styling around cups, cross-country skating. You can join suicide skates and learn aggressive skating. You can join the weekly roller disco on Thursday nights at Canvas Bagley’s Studios at Kings Cross (this is especially recommended for men having a mid-life crisis).
You can even be an armchair skater and spend time gossiping on the internet forums at www.serpentineroad.com. Or you can become an equipment anorak, and spend your time sitting in Hyde Park discussing the finer points of wheel bearings.
Once or twice a year, the Friday skate or others organize a trip abroad. There are similar mass street skates in Paris, Barcelona, Zurich, Berlin. A friend recently came back from a 5-day, 300 km group-skate across Holland.
And, if you are inclined, you will learn the way to the Victoria Pub, at the end of Sussex Place in Bayswater. There are skaters there most days, and it’s jammed with them after 10pm on Wednesdays and Fridays after the skates end.
How to start. Don’t buy skates until you try a few out. Maybe rent some at the Blue Room store on Edgware Road near Marble Arch. And as you wobble up and down the Serpentine Road, there will be instructors sitting by the side of the road like holy men along the banks of the Ganges, willing to share some wisdom in exchange for baksheesh.
Oh there’s nothing better on a balmy summer’s night. Once a month, the Friday skate does a one-way skate snaking all through central London to the Elusive Camel pub near the south end of Tower Bridge. Everyone breaks into little groups to find their way home however they wish. On a recent gorgeously hot Friday, I join 8 others to skate with the music-bike back to its home in Battersea.
We swerve and duck through heavy traffic, screaming cheers at the cars and pedestrians, voguing to the deafening music (musical arabesques of the Chemical Brothers ‘My finger is On The Button’). The man on the 4-wheeled music cycle is Ono, a legendary cyclist with powerful mahogany legs the size of men’s chests. Behind the bike skate a pair of slim and pretty Malaysian roller women, blowing their whistles.
The whole way through Embankment and past the Houses of Parliament at midnight, we all just keep looking at each other and laughing. This is so much fun. We have all felt somehow connected. When we finally say goodbye, we can’t get the smiles off our faces. We have shared something wonderful.
END
(c) Brad Hall 10 July 2005
Fringe Report (c) Fringe Report 2002-2008
