Elsewhere: The Story of UK Skateboarding 1987–2002 by Neil Macdonald
Neil Macdonald spent six years on this book, working through hundreds of hours of interviews to trace UK skateboarding from the start of street skating in the late '80s to the point everything went digital and corporate in the early 2000s. He writes as scienceversuslife, and he's spent as long building one of the largest skate media archives in the country, magazines, film, clothing, which shows in the depth here.
The book moves chronologically through the scene: the shops, the magazines, the homegrown brands, the ramps built in warehouses up north and the streets skated in the south. It's less a highlight reel than a record of how a subculture built its own identity apart from its Californian roots, and how that identity ended up shaping fashion, film and photography well beyond skateboarding itself.
Neil will be at the shop on the 17th September to talk through it in person.
