The 1970s boom and the great closures

Skateboarding had been around in Britain before, but the version that arrived in the late 1970s was new. Soft urethane wheels, first sold in the early 1970s, let Californian skaters carve banks, pools and bowls, and the photos of them doing it travelled fast. By 1977 the craze had properly reached the UK, and British magazines such as Skateboard!, Skateboard Scene and Skateboard Special all started that year.

Skaters needed somewhere to ride, and plenty of people saw a business in it. In October 1977 Skate City opened on London's South Bank near Tower Bridge, usually named as the country's first commercial skatepark. Over the next year or so private firms and local councils built parks right across the country, from big multi-bowl sites to a single bank in the corner of a village rec. Outside the United States, no country built more of them than Britain.

Some of the best were designed by Adrian Rolt of G-Force and built by Skate Park Construction during 1978, including the Rom in Hornchurch, Solid Surf in Harrow and Black Lion in Gillingham. They copied what skaters had seen in the magazines: snake runs, moguls, half-pipes with vert extensions and smooth white pools with blue tiles. London alone had Rolling Thunder, Mad Dog Bowl, Meanwhile Gardens, Stockwell, Skatecircus and more.

The boom did not last. Numbers dropped, insurance got more expensive and leases came up for renewal at higher prices, and most parks simply could not pay their way. By the early 1980s nearly all of them had been closed, filled with rubble or built over, and skating carried on in the streets, at the Southbank and on home-made wooden ramps.

A handful came through. The Rom survived thanks to the family who bought it soon after it opened, and in September 2014 it became the first skatepark in Europe to be listed, at Grade II. Solid Surf in Harrow, Southsea in Portsmouth, Stockwell and Kennington in south London, Bowes Lyon in Stevenage and smaller relics such as Combe near Oxford, Crabble in Dover and Spinny Bowl in Gosport are still there in some form. Livingston, opened in 1981 just as others were closing, is often grouped with them.

Others are still underground. Black Lion in Gillingham, Skateopia at Knebworth and Kelvin Wheelies in Glasgow were buried rather than dug out, and archaeologists have started taking an interest. Researchers reckon fewer than one in twenty of the world's early concrete parks survive, and a fair share of those are in Britain.