Skating in London
A patchy and incomplete history of the early LondonSkate
It’s hard to remember everyone’s names but things for me kicked off once I was invited to join a bunch of people playing ultimate frisbee in Hyde Park. Never played, but had previously made fun of friends playing it at uni, stupid me, turned out to be completely awesome. The summer of 1999 was ON.
Anyway, IIRC, one day Tamara’s husband Simon and possibly his mate Greg turned up to play, and the three of us must have gotten talking about skating. Simon had played ice hockey at university, and a bunch of them used to play roller hockey by the Albert Memorial nearby on Tuesday or Thursday nights. I can’t remember. I was kindly invited to join so I brought my own sticks and a couple of mates that I used to skate around a lot with, which is how frisbee and skating became pretty core to my summer evenings for the next few decades.
Some of the lads had been to various marathons and streetskates in Europe, notably the Paris-Roller, and came back all excited and suggesting we do one in London. One big question was which evening. Friday was an obvious one but we discounted that as everyone preferred to go and party of a Friday, Mondays were frisbee night, and we played hockey as well. So we went with Wednesday.
Simon and his wife Tamara had a couple of little boutiques called SweatyBetty and an existing relationship with suppliers and web designers and a team of staff that were all roped into help. SweatyBetty basically funded the whole shebang as a business marketing exercise, and we named the skate the BettyBlade, Simon turned up with t-shirts for everyone, a ton of flyers, had his agency build us a really pretty website, and persuaded his team to learn to skate with us. And then we spent a few weeks flyering the living daylights out of every skater we could find in every park in every borough. It was a bit mad.
We were all getting excited about it, figuring out routes, how to marshal it, music, atmosphere, but there were a few hiccups.
Simon had been in touch with the authorities about it, and about two days before our big launch, the Royal Parks couriered a letter to him forbidding us from doing any such thing as the thing we were going to be doing. Balls.
The plan was to meet on Serpentine Road at the car park end - an area colloquially known to skaters as “The Beach”, due to all the sand around from the horse track and its proximity to the water front - and from there we would skate down to Hyde Park Corner and off around London. That caused a flurry of emails and some angst until Simon decided to ignore the Parks and we would proceed as planned.
It was great, proper party atmosphere, a bunch of the guys had brought a bucket of stuff from the party shop, wigs, whistles, balloons and were getting into the mood. There were quite a lot of people, and I can’t really remember the route but I think we went as far as Tower Bridge and then back. Before heading to The Swan by Lancaster Gate for many drinks. Or did we go back to The Ennismore Arms? That was our usual pub after hockey and frisbee - tucked away in Ennismore Mews, great pub. Closed and demolished, if you’re thinking of looking for it. More: (https://www.closedpubs.co.uk/london/sw7_southkensington_ennismorearms.html)
The Swan was great because of the huge outdoor seating out the front, but they never really liked us and we eventually migrated to The Victoria. That’s a different story, though.
After a year of the Bettyblade, Shaun took over running the marhshals and did it infinitely more professionally and better than before, with a proper setup and system, we renamed ourselves the LondonSkate and off we went into 2001.
