Skate Culture Article #5 - New Concrete...

Today was the date of this year's Perth Skate Jam. Basically just a big, fun, free competition at the Perth concrete skatepark organised by skaters, for skaters. Time for another Skate Culture Article. These are a series of Skate Culture Articles which I may turn into something in the future but if you want to read any of the others, use the Blip search to search for tagged skateculturearticle by tractorfactoryphotos. Today I thought about going into what I call Scotland's New Concrete. ps, it makes more sense to LARGE this one up.

Skate Culture Article #5 - New Concrete...
Skateboarding went through a worldwide slump in the early nineties to a point where only very few people were still skating and when only single ramps and small skateparks were getting built. The revival came on the back of the Tony Hawk Pro Skater video games in the late nineties and a renewed media interest gave the whole sport a boost in attention that eventually put it back into the mainstream conciousness. This manifested itself in Scotland by the building of new, large skateparks.

Livingston is home to Scotland's oldest skatepark, built in 1982, but Perth skatepark was the start of the new concrete revolution in Scotland. It was the first large scale skatepark built in the country since Livingston, constructed by Perth and Kinross council. It was designed with the skaters of Perth and archtechturally drawn up and designed by Clive Bowman, a landscape architect that worked for the council at the time.

After Perth came major outdoor skateparks at Blantyre and Glasgow while the Edinburgh skatepark continued it's struggle to get built on a similar scale and quality (incidentally work is due to begin on the Edinburgh skatepark next week, finally!) with other smaller but of similar high quality skateparks cropping up all over this wee country. For the size of country, Scotland is very well endowed with quality skate concrete and is testamount to the number really good skateboarders that it produces time and again.