UK skate magazines

Britain got its first skateboard magazine in the summer of 1977, when Felix Dennis, who had earlier been behind Oz, put out Skateboard! at the height of the first boom. It set out to help readers tell good kit from bad and to call out makers who oversold their products. Other titles such as Skateboard Scene and Skateboard Special came and went over the same couple of years, and most had gone by the time the boom faded at the end of the decade.

The next great title grew out of a BMX magazine. Tim Leighton-Boyce, editor of BMX Action Bike, slipped more and more skating in through a supplement, and in 1987, as bike advertising dried up, the magazine became R.a.D, short for Read and Destroy. Leighton-Boyce edited it and shot many of its photos. R.a.D made a point of covering scenes far from London: backyard ramps, local spots, and the mini-ramp and street skating that were taking over. Designer Dan Adams joined in 1991 and Wig Worland became its chief photographer. The editorship changed in 1993, and after its publishers ran into repeated money trouble the magazine closed in 1995. The R.a.D scans on The Deck Wall come from this run.

R.a.D was not alone. Skateboard! came back in May 1988 with Steve Kane, who had written for the original, as editor. He has said the two magazines quietly split the ground between them, with R.a.D taking the mail-order adverts and Skateboard! leaning on product reviews, so that companies could not play one off against the other. The revived Skateboard! folded in 1992 when its publisher went bust.

In the autumn of 1995 Sidewalk Surfer arrived from Permanent Publishing in Oxford, owned by Jim Peskett and edited by Ben Powell, with a young Tom Penny on the first cover. For a while it was the only British skate magazine, and later shortened its name to Sidewalk. Wig Worland, Andy Horsley and others shot for it, and it went on to be owned by Factory Media. Kingpin also became one of the main titles over these years.

Print took a heavy blow in 2015. On 31 March Factory Media stopped all its print titles to concentrate on digital, ending both Sidewalk and Kingpin on paper. Sidewalk's final issue, number 221, had Sam Beckett on the cover, and the title carried on as a website. Kingpin had already dropped from twelve issues a year to six.

The gap was filled by skaters themselves. Kingpin's editor Will Harmon, along with Arthur Derrien and photo editor Sam Ashley, started Free in the summer of 2015 as an independent, Europe-wide magazine. Henry Kingsford's Grey had been running out of London since around 2010, with a strong lean towards black-and-white street photography, and Vague was on its second issue by November 2017, with launch parties in London and Manchester.

R.a.D's story has since been told in Dan Adams's book Read and Destroy, published in 2024, which draws on years of archiving the magazine's photos and slides.