Bike Expedition To Gladesville Skatepark

I work rostered shifts covering various news programmes at the ABC. This week I'm on Lateline (if you live in Britain, you can understand this as Australia's Newsnight). The shift starts at 2pm and ends at 10.36pm. There are of course bad things about this, but one good thing is the big chunk of daytime to play in before work. Sometimes I indulge in lengthy peregrinations on my bicycle, like yesterday, when I rode out to the Gladesville/Henley area of northwest Sydney to visit a skateboard park there. 

The journey was around 13kms, which I extended a kilometer by taking a wrong turn, as you can see on this map:

I strapped my board to my bike and was soon on the peaceful canalside paths of Haberfield, but it wasn't long to busy Lyons Road and the grim multi-lane Victoria Road, where a ute-load of passing bogans leaned from their windows to deliver a doppler-distorted roar of abuse. I crossed the Parramatta River by the Gladesville Bridge, where I tried to follow a presumed bike/foot path on the left-hand side as I rode northwards, but had to stop and lift my bike over the barrier onto the treacherous 4-lane road when the path became too narrow to continue. What the hell, Sydney. A lovely blast of salty harbour air punched through the vehicle fumes as I reached the apex of the bridge, and it was not far from there to the skatepark. 

The small park has a V formation that makes good use of the limited space, you can see that on the plans:

There's a couple of interesting obstacles: a jersey barrier:

 ...and a weird origami-style folded metal flatbank:

Then there's the usual - a transitioned quarterpipe, rails, some manny pads and ledges.

It was the first time I'd skated a jersey barrier, and I managed a few wallridey kickturns on it. The metal flatbank was clangy fun. Here I am doing a pop shove-it body varial (sex change?) on it. Yes, I'm wearing a cycling jersey and jeans. You saw it here first.

Bike Tank

I attended a Bike Tank event last week. It was on from 8-9am on a Tuesday, in a wonderfully shabby ex-industrial warehouse space in Chippendale. I recently read David Byrne's Bicycle Diaries, where he gets involved in all kinds of community forums promoting bicycle use in cities. I want to get involved, too. I visited their website to get a better idea of what it's all about:

The BikeTank is an urban connectivist think-tank that doubles as a bicycle pitstop cafe. 

I don't know what connectivist means, so I check an online dictionary. It's not in the dictionary either. But it's in Wikipedia... what the heck I didn't sign up for a lesson in social learning theory here. At least there's a cafe. Maybe it'll make sense if I read a bit more...

"What do we mean by 'making cities more human'?"

Our view is a granular one.

Design is performative.
It is the act of creating, then sharing, that matters. It's even better if you co-create.

Design is projective.
Design seeds ideas. As Alan Kay famously remarked: "The best way to predict the future is to invent it."

This doesn't clarify things for me; in fact it sounds like something out of Pseud's Corner. But I decided to attend - perhaps I will develop a granular view and learn about the oeuvre of Alan Kay. At least I'll get a coffee.

I got up and went, despite not starting work 'til 12noon. I arrived late at 8.40 to find that everyone had formed groups around tables. They were attaching shapes made of polystyrene foam and pipe cleaners to sheets of thick board with craft glue. I briefly hovered around these tables before making my way to the coffee stall and partook of a free large latte. Then I moved over to where the pastries were, and shoved a raspberry danish, apple danish, and pain au chocolate into my face. I lifted an apple and placed it into my bag for later. Then I had another raspberry danish.

This took me up to the conclusion of the event. The groups disbanded and re-assembled in front of a stage as representative speakers took the floor to deliver the results of their discussion, and display the boards to which they had been gluing stuff. It turns out each group represented a different suburb. They had been spitballing ways to improve cycling in these areas. The results were largely whimsical, such as a car-wash style device that people could ride through to clean their bodies, clothing and bicycles at the same time. 

Some ideas seemed to be the domain of private enterprise rather than local government (Bike Tank is supported by the City of Sydney); a cafe was envisioned on a street corner to maximise ease of access, where cyclists could meet, bicycles could be serviced, and food and drink served. Another such idea was a bike taxi service, where you could ride to a pub, get drunk, then have someone else ride your bike home for you.

The Newtown delegation present their ideas

Not all the ideas were daft. Most of the obvious ways of improving cycling were spoken in the opening minutes - more bike lanes, more bike parking, bike racks on buses, more showers and bike facilities in workplaces. But then each subsequent group had to step forward and continue after the obvious statements had been made, which prompted the silliness. 

Having spent longer analysing their website, I now understand that there were local entrepreneurs and designers in attendance. Hopefully these people can take the ideas raised and develop practical applications. For instance, the bike taxi service demonstrates a need to get your bike home after a drink, but a better solution would be some taxi cabs carrying bike racks.

I'm not convinced of the efficacy of Bike Tank. It seems to me that the key to improving provisions for cyclists is to encourage more bike use by working with people who would cycle but don't, addressing their concerns and removing the obstacles that keep them off their bikes. The people in attendance are already using bikes, and the tendency of these meetings is towards self-congratulation and the reinforcement of an us-and-them attitude. The bike cafe, for instance - I don't want to hang out with other people who ride bikes any more than I want to hang out with other people who drive cars or walk on footpaths. It's just a mode of transport, and treating it like an exclusive subculture is not going to encourage the average Sydney commuter out of their car.

Cammeray Skatepark

I rode my bike to skate at Cammeray a few days ago. I found a good route across Darling Harbour to cut through the CBD, and onto the Kent Street bicycle lanes, before traversing the Harbour Bridge.

wind blows flags on a mast by Sydney Observatory

bike lane across the harbour bridge

Once over the bridge into North Sydney the streets are far less bike-friendly, particularly on the approach to the skatepark, where a triple-carriageway road overpasses a multi-lane highway. The skatepark is bordered by the off-limits grey and green wastelands of the aforementioned roads and a gold course; there is a tennis club on another side. It's the worst kind of austere urban landscape, windswept and unsympathetic. The only people on foot are golfers scowling at the half-acre of fairway the skatepark has deprived them of.

Cammeray skatepark is a plaza-style 'street' park; it has no transition, just flat banks, ledges and rails, which is fine by me. The surface is amazing and the obstacles are fun - the 'whale' thing is a hoot. I would skate there more, but it's further than Waterloo, which is also a nice wee street plaza park.  I stuck some Cammeray footage into this shocking little video of Sydney skateparks that I have cobbled together from iPhone footage. I used Prefab Sprout's King of Rock 'n' Roll because, like my skating, it is the opposite of hardcore. Switch-epic. The music and terrible editing amplify an atmosphere of lameness. I am 34.

 

Three Sydney Skateparks

Bondi Skatepark

Bondi is an eastern suburb of Sydney with an extremely popular surf beach. The area was named after the surf community was deeply affected by the death of beloved AC/DC singer Bon Scott in February of 1980. For weeks, traumatised surfers aimlessly wandered the length of their beach lamenting the loss of the talismanic singer, repeating, "Bon die, Bon die, Bon die." These words became associated with the place, and the place became associated with the mighty surfers of Australia courageously staring melanoma in the face and saying "bring it on!"

Bondi is also celebrated as one of the planet's number one places for scoping on hot babes, but as my visit coincides with a biting autumn wind, the beach is very quiet. I have lived in Sydney for over 2 years but this is the first time I have ever been here - my Scottish skin is vampirically susceptible to sunlight, and I prefer quieter beaches, like Vaucluse. I do not like the Baywatch vibe, and I find myself becoming fixated with male body hair when I go to places like this. When did chest-waxing become so prevalent and acceptable? Is it acceptable, or is it every bare-chested beach bunny's dirty little shame, carried out in secret in a locked bathroom with watering eyes and suppressed yelps of pain? I mock their hairless Bieber tits.

I ride my bike there, and it's a fine ride apart from briefly finding myself in the midst of 60km-per-hour traffic in a multi-lane road. The ride is just under 19km. The skatepark overlooks the beach, and it's a bit of a fishbowl - passersby stand and gawp as they lick ice cream and shout the names of tricks learned from playing Tony Hawk Playstation games.

The park is dominated by the bowl. It is a deep scary thing, famously the venue of the annual Bowl-A-Rama contest. I lower myself into the shallow end and do a couple of kickturns, but I will never be a bowl skater. The 'street' course is very tight; there's some ledges and stuff that I can't figure out how to get at. The section with the flat bank hips and bowled-out corners is fun.

Bondi skatepark

Bondi bowl - handrail bg gives scale

I'm dehydrated and have a sore tummy stomach ache, so I ride south to see my beloved wife and the band Dusker recording in Coogee. As I ride, I notice a pile of books at the roadside and find this lovely Faber paperback. It includes a fantastic MR James chiller, and a story by Saki, who I have never read before, but whose former home, marked by a plaque, I used to pass as I walked to a previous job in London.

a spook-takular find

Dusker are recording in Studio Zapata. I rock out to some Bart-beats as I lock my bike to a tree outside. Apparently Sleepy Jackson recorded their album Lovers in here. Have you listened to that lately? What a great record. I'm listening to it now.

Dusker in the studio

On my way home I do not get lost - Sydney, I own you now - and stop for wedding-flavoured blueberry cheesecake and coffee at Chocoreve patisserie in Stanmore, where our wedding cake was made. What the hell, here's a picture of our wedding cake. It was baked blueberry cheesecake on the bottom, alcohol and chocolate cake on the top. Birds made by tha D-double-E. The wee bird me's even got a wee skateboard.

Cake is important

SK8 $HOPZ

There weren’t many skateboard shops in Scotland when I started skating, and they were located far from city centres so were hard to reach. I would pore over the product pages of skateboard magazines and work myself into a covetous frenzy before the rare occasions I got to visit a shop. The nearest was Clan Skates 2 in Dundee, a poky wee place with such little stock that I had to compromise on whatever deck I had formed a fixation upon in a skateboard magazine. But I had no frame of reference, it was the only skate shop that I knew, and I loved it in there. I love skateboards. I love skate shoes. I love skate videos, and there was usually one of those screening on a little portable TV in the shop. I retain this obsession with skateboard products and skateboard shops, and I still can't pass one by.

There is a new shop right next to Waterloo Skate Park, which is the main place that I skate in Sydney. But this is all I've ever seen of the place:

This isn't photoshopped. It is actually called that.

First, the name: BOYZ SK8N. It could be the title of a gay porn movie. It sounds as if it was named by a pathetic old pederast as part of a seedy plan to get his mitts on little skater kids, but whose only point of contact with skateboarding is that Avril Lavigne song. It makes no commercial sense for it implies exclusivity to males, inasmuch as it implies anything, being nonsensical pseudo-textspeak mishmash of such insulting stupidity that I hope for its speedy and catastrophic failure.

All I have ever seen of this shop is closed shutters. It hasn't been open any time I've been there, and I go to the adjacent skatepark two or three times a week. It’s common to find a lackadaisical or inept approach to business among skateboard shops; lost and bungled mail orders, badly stocked shops, shops opening late, and shops staffed either by non-skaters who don't know their product, or by skaters who are hostile to everyone but their immediate friends. 

It isn't difficult to run a skate shop - skateboarding is a thriving scene with a covetable cultural cachet for non-skaters (everyone wears skate shoes and clothing these days) - and although there will be many pressures upon a small business of this kind, I have seen dozens of skate shops fail over my years skating, and I've seen those with rudimentary competence flourish. Like most skaters, I harbour ambitions of somehow making a living from skateboarding and I have toyed with the idea of opening a skate shop, so I don’t blame skaters for giving it a go. But we’re not entitled to make a living out of skating in this way unless we have the requisite skills to make a retail business work, and for that shop put something back into skating. BOYZ SK8N does the opposite – it’s an embarrassment. 

Annandale Skatepark Bike Trip

A few days ago I rode out on my bike to find Annandale skatepark in Sydney's Inner West. 

I was keen to use my board because I had painted on the griptape for the first time in about 20 years. I wanted to write something antithetical to the gnar-text usually seen on skateboards, so I wrote "BBC Radio 4", which I probably listen to more than anything else these days. Incidentally, Radio 4 are reportedly seeking to reshape their image into something more 'youth-friendly', which is a terrible idea. Radio 4 is something that people will come to as they get older, and that's fine. I wasn't aware of it as a child or teenager, and I would have hated it. But now I love the high-mindedness and seriousness of programmes like In Our Time and Start The Week, I love the news, and I love the comedy, and I would be right pissed off if R4 had its tone diluted with an affectation of youth-speak. Radio 4 is rad, and this is official, cause it's written on a skateboard. I also wrote Dusker (my wife Dee's band) and drew a lightning bolt - lightning bolts are cool.

So off I bicycled with my newly-decorated board strapped to my back, and the first place I stopped is a storm drain that runs through Summer Hill to the Hawthorn Canal. It is near murderous to wish for drought in Australia, but just look at this thing. I wish that trickle of water would dry up and allow a skate.

I rode on, and arrived at Annandale skatepark. It's a piece of shit, but the viaduct is pretty. The skatepark is a modular thing with a few quarterpipes and a little driveway. It's narrow, so there's no scope to carve around. 

The flat bank has a horrid crack across the bottom that my wheels got stuck in, and it chucked my into the bank the first time I rode the park. Shitey.

So I stuck around for a few minutes, then rode off to check out somewhere I'd noticed in the Richard Murden Reserve by the Hawthorn canal in Haberfield. I guess this is intended for BMX bikes. I don't know. 

It is too rough to skate. Maybe some fun can be had with big soft wheels, but there was nothing for me here, so off I rode. 

This is my bike, by the way, it's a 1968 Claude Butler with a full contemporary Campagnolo set. I'll give the full story of losing my old bike in a car crash at a later time, I think.

I hadn't really had a proper skate after all this, and riding home I saw some basketball courts and decided to stop for a little bit of flatland. I like skating around basketball courts, it reminds me of  Rodney Mullen's part from the Plan B Questionable video. It was fun, there were sections of grass between the courts that you could blast across. Wheeee!

And then I rode home.