The Buszy and the skate plazas

Milton Keynes was built almost by accident for street skating, with granite ledges, sets of stairs and sloping underpasses all over the centre. Skaters were using the old central bus station opposite the railway station long before anyone planned for them. The Ince family, who later started Radlands, ran a café there and sold boards to the locals, and the first organised contest at the bus station was held in 1992.

By the early 2000s the city had to decide what to do about skaters in the centre. In 2002 the city architect Andrew Armes started a project called SK8MK to find a dedicated place for them, and the architectural historian Iain Borden advised the council during these years.

Instead of a fenced-in ramp park, the answer was to treat the empty bus station as a street spot and make it better. Local skater Rob Selley and designer Richard Ferrington drew up the plans with input from the scene, and The Buszy opened in 2005. Most of it sits under the big roof of the listed modernist bus station, so it stays dry, which matters in Britain. The people behind it say it was the first purpose-built skate plaza in the world, and Borden's work has described it the same way.

Brands touring the UK made it a regular stop, and Plan B held the Battle of the Buszy there in 2007. Between 2005 and 2016 a community interest company also ran youth services from the building. Since around 2018, though, parts of the site have been fitted with skate-stoppers, pushing locals back out to the wider city.

The plaza idea soon spread. In late 2005 Stoke-on-Trent opened a £500,000 plaza in Central Forest Park, planned with the Stoke Association of Skateboarders and full of rails, steps, kerbed ledges and granite benches. Cardiff's Barrage plaza, opened around 2010, recreated a street setting in granite, marble and brick over more than 1,100 square metres and included the 1.8-metre Beijing Gap. Northampton's Radlands Plaza followed in 2012.

Plazas changed what British councils thought a skatepark could be. Rather than ramps on a slab, they borrowed the benches, ledges and stairs that street skaters had always looked for, and built them to last.