Skate Culture Article #10: Waves to Concrete...

Skateboarding owes it's roots to surfing and is a result of surfers in America trying to find a way of getting that surfing feeling when there were no waves around to provide it. Skateboards were concocted so that the surfing could be carried out on streets and sidewalks and finding inclined alphalt surfaces was the natural urban equivalent of the wave.

With skateboarding these inclines, the natural progression was then headed towards steeper more vertical surfaces to skate on and a drought that clutched California in skateboardings infancy provided these vertical surfaces in the form of rounded, empty swimming pools that couldn't be filled. This is where ramp skating came from and essentially is the birth of pool skating such as this 10 foot beauty that lives in Saughton Skatepark in Edinburgh.

Shezz here has got such a stylish was of doing frontside grinds in this bowl that perfectly illustrate skateboardings relationship to surfing. He might as well be on a surfboard in the water with the way he does them as he totally throws them round as if throwing spray off the top of the wave adding in a little urethane to concrete growl and the wheels slide round.

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Notes on Skate Culture Articles...
This is part of a series of Skate Culture Articles I've been writing as an insight into the sport of skateboarding for an outsider. You can find the rest of the articles by entering tagged skateculturearticle by tractorfactoryphotos into the BlipSearch.