Skate Nottingham
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Skate Nottingham Skateboarding and nottingham’S development Skate Nottingham, July 2016 Contents 1. Introduction to Skate Nottingham .................................................................................................. 1 2. The Case for Developing Skateboarding in Nottingham ................................................................. 4 2.1 Indicators of Need and Potential Impact in Nottingham City and St Ann’s Ward ...................... 10 2.2 Aims and Objectives for Skate Nottingham ................................................................................ 12 3. Findings from the King Edward Park User Survey ......................................................................... 14 3.1 Demographic Profile of Responses ............................................................................................. 14 3.2 Skateboarding and Active Lifestyles ........................................................................................... 15 3.3 Public Skateparks and User Preferences for the King Edward Park Facility ............................... 17 4. Design Ideas for King Edward Park ............................................................................................... 20 Skate Nottingham, July 2016 Contact us on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/SkateNottingham/ Skate Nottingham 1. Introduction to Skate Nottingham As one of the fastest growing activities for young people globally and almost certain to be included for the first time in the 2020 Tokyo Olympics, skateboarding has the potential to contribute positively to Nottingham’s development. Although once dominated by young males, skateboarding is increasingly inter-generational and also increasingly popular with women and girls, particularly in developing countries - for example, young girls make up a large share of beneficiaries of the Skateistan projects (the ‘sport for development’ NGO that engages young people in Afghanistan, Cambodia and South Africa, teaching more than 1,200 children aged between 5 and 18 a week, 40% of which are girls).1 Skateboarding encourages an active lifestyle. Of the skateboarders in Nottingham and the East Midlands who responded to our user survey for King Edward Park, 53% skated between 2 and 3 times every week and 36% skated more than 4 times a week. It is also something that people engage with throughout their active lives: 38% of our survey respondents had skated for between 6 and 10 years, 18% between 11 and 15 years, 9% between 16 and 20 and 7% more than 20 years. When correlated with the age of the respondents, most had been skateboarding for more than half their lives.2 Skateboarding is demanding, requiring and teaching balance, coordination, perseverance and mental and physical resilience. Because it is fundamentally an individualist activity with strong social and non- competitive characteristics, it is appealing to those who are not attracted to team sports or more rigidly organised activities. As the East Midlands has one of the lowest rates of participation in sport out of the nine English regions (at 34.8% of adults participating at least once a week compared to 38.7% in the South East and 37.4% in London),3 the growing popularity of skateboarding is an opportunity to increase participation and to address the challenges of ill-health associated with increasingly sedentary childhood and adult home and working lives. There is no right or wrong way to skateboard, with professional skaters (many of whom have more social media followers than the multi-national brands who sponsor them) varying from performance athletes, capable of incredible physical feats, to those who interact with the architecture around them in a more creative, even dance-like way. The aesthetic and technical aspects of capturing and documenting skateboarding mean that skaters frequently achieve a high level of mastery in photography, videography, art, design and fashion. Internationally, famous skateboarders include film directors Spike Jonze (who won an Oscar for his film ‘Her’) and Harmony Korine, artists Ed Templeton and Mark Gonzales, and writers and academics such as Kyle Beachy, Scott Bourne, Professor Ocean Howell and Professor Iain Borden. Skateboarders are behind hugely successful contemporary fashion labels such as Supreme and Palace, have launched award winning Not-for-Profit ventures such as Skateistan and SkatePal as well as the Long Live Southbank campaign (which won the 2014 Change Opinion award for Engagement Campaign of the Year). Skateboarding has been prioritised for investment by Nike and Adidas, and is one of only seven sports for which Nike makes bespoke equipment for (the Nike skateboarding division sits alongside its running, football, basketball, tennis, golf, and American football divisions - the company has exclusively targeted its activity to these priority areas). 1 For more information, see: http://skateistan.org/content/our-story 2 For more information on the King Edward Park User Survey, including sample size, methodology and detailed overview of responses, please see Section 3 of this report. 3 Sport England, 2016. ‘Active People Survey’, April 2015-March 2016. URL: https://www.sportengland.org/research/who-plays-sport/local-picture/ 1 Skate Nottingham There is a strong case for Nottingham to be regarded as one of the homes of UK skateboarding, with past iconic skatespots such as the old Broadmarsh brick banks and the original Old Market Square appearing in international magazines and videos between the 1970s and early 2000s. In the 1990s, the editor and chief photographer of the UK’s longest lasting magazine, Sidewalk Surfer, were residents in the city, and two of the UK’s largest distributors and mail order companies had stores in Nottingham (Rollersnakes and HSC) alongside the 30+ year independent store Non Stop. Every weekend, several hundred skateboarders could be seen in the city centre, and Rock City hosted two large scale indoor ‘skate festival’ events in 1996 and 1997. Although skating grew in world- and nationwide popularity from 2000 (with the release of the Tony Hawk Pro Skater game on the Playstation), enforcement of a bye law and subsequent redevelopment of the Old Market Square and the closure of both Rollersnakes and HSC saw skateboarding in Nottingham decline for several years, whilst it flourished in other UK and European cities. A number of these cities benefited from ‘skate tourism’, notably Barcelona, but also Berlin, Paris, Lyon, Nantes, Cologne, Madrid, Milan and London. Transworld estimate that the number of skateboarders in the UK increased from 35,000 in 1996 to as many as 300,000 in 2001 (supporting $10 million sales annually). More recent estimates are not available, but with the entry of Nike/Converse, Adidas and New Balance from the mid-2000s, both the number of participants and annual sales value are likely to be significantly higher. It has been estimated that 1 in 10 male teenagers own a skateboard, and in the USA skateboarding is the second most participated in sport for those under 18. 2 Skate Nottingham Figure 1: Covers of Sidewalk magazine in the 1990s-early 2000s featuring Nottingham skateboarders (clockwise from top left) Alan Rushbrooke (now UK Key Accounts Representative for Vans footwear); Alan ‘Harry’ Cuthbertson; Jon Weatherall; and Scott Underdown (who now works at Nottingham’s independent skate retailer ‘42’). In recent years, skateboarding in Nottingham has experienced a resurgence, and is now stronger than it has been than at any time in the past. Local skateboarders have graced the covers of national and international magazines and have filmed video parts that have been critically acclaimed in the US and Europe (most recently, Nottingham Professional skateboarder Will Golding with a video part for Tony Hawk’s Ride Channel). Nottingham skateboarder Alex Halford has won a string of recent UK and European championships, including the 2015 Boardmasters, the 2015 and 2016 War of the Thistles and the 2015 UK Mini Ramp Championships, and Will Golding was one of only 35 skaters worldwide to be invited to the finals of the Red Bull ‘Hold the Line’ competition at the Royal Albert Hall. At a grassroots level, skateboarding in Nottingham provides the context for a wide variety of ongoing art, film, social enterprise and photography projects, including Varial Magazine, an independent photo magazine showcasing East Midlands skate photography, and The Splinter Cell, a woodworking company that produces high-specification bespoke furniture and ornaments from recycled skateboard decks. To build on this activity and ensure that the community is sustained for future generations, we formed Skate Nottingham under a small charity constitution in October 2015, with objectives to: Establish a positive working relationship with the relevant Local Authorities in order to contribute to the design, consultation, activation (including events, skate schools, etc.) and maintenance of the estate of public skate parks in Nottingham and Nottinghamshire; To change the perception of skateboarding in Nottingham, promoting it as a healthy and culturally rich activity that can contribute to the city’s development and active and creative 3 Skate Nottingham life (for example, in Sheffield, a skate demo and competition was part of the 2016 #theoutdoorcity programme of events); Organise events and social activities and apply for funding for projects to ‘scale-up’ skateboarding in Nottingham, to promote the city as a national and global destination; and Identify opportunities