Skate Nottingham's Chris Lawton walks (or should that be skates?) us down the long, sometimes arduous, road to the new Road to Tram Line Spot film by Georgianna Scurfield, now released on LeftLion...
Together with Leftlion Magazine, Skate Nottingham are stoked to bring you Road to Tram Line Spot, a 16-minute documentary made by our friend Georgianna Scurfield. You can watch that here, on this very website.
Completed last autumn, the film has now been screened at skateboarding festivals in Tampere, Finland; Budweis, Czechia; the Mansfield International Film Festival; and most recently, the Connect festival of ‘skate urbanism’ in Bordeaux, France. But it has only had limited screenings in Nottingham. Standard for a city that has consistently struggled to celebrate its own successes. The frustrating lack of pride exhibited by the great-and-the-good in Nottingham’s communities and the assets our communities create is one of the themes that Georgi goes a good way to unpicking in her brilliant, sometimes gut-punching film.
She started filming with us way back in 2018, when London legend Henry Edwards-Wood (known to skateboarders as ‘Hold Tight Henry’ for his banging skate video series through the 2000s and early 2010s) joined us for a Festival of Science and Curiosity workshop, to share the story of Long Live Southbank, the grassroots campaign that successfully preserved the under-croft space beneath London’s South Bank Centre for skaters and wider public use. At this time, Georgi had the vague idea of something akin to a protest piece, that would chart the history of the Broadmarsh Banks (the Midlands’ most famous ‘found’ skate spot), its demolition in 2009, and then its subsequent 12+ year life as a ‘dead space’ where once children (and adults) had played. You can read all about the honking stupidity of that particular story in this brilliant article, also for LeftLion, by social historian and skateboarder Dan O’Neill.
The gist of the film is that the space, originally built as an abstract, Brutalist-utopian play area for children resident in flats that would never be built, became accidentally famous within the skateboarding, BMX, breakdancing and graffiti communities, due to similarities to structures found in the US that were beloved to those sub-cultures. Fast forward almost 30 years, and the site’s former owners, the Westfield Group, called in the diggers, in the erroneous belief that the brick banks covered potentially dangerous gas pipes… only to find nothing but mud lay beneath, as a casual check of Nottingham’s archives would have quickly shown. The former hallowed ground was quietly tarmacked over and rapidly became a muggers’ alley and outdoor urinal; an act described in our film by Ben Powell (former editor of Sidewalk Magazine) as “cultural vandalism.”
But the scope and tone of Georgi’s project changed radically in late 2019, after Skate Nottingham were invited to the then-Chief Executive’s office of Nottingham City Council to discuss the potential for a new skateable space a few metres nearer the steps up to the Nottingham Contemporary – as part of a wider public realm development that would be known as Sussex Street, itself a prologue to the series of projects surrounding the regeneration of the Greater Broadmarsh site. Georgi’s film instantly became a more hopeful undertaking, as she collected the excitement and ideas of some of the 100s of young people who then took part in 2-3 years of co-design, education and activation projects that spanned the Covid-19 period and beyond, including 2 major National Lottery-funded ‘Skateboarding in the City’ festivals (in 2019 and the again in 2021). Georgi’s film thus became about the space that would become Tram Line Spot (TLS) – named by pal and Skate Nottingham coach Connor Law to channel skateboarding’s utilitarian and humorously throwaway nomenclature, exemplified by Malmö’s ‘Train Bank Spot’ (TBS).
With help from a series of grants from The National Lottery Community Fund, Georgi set about documenting the genesis of Tram Line Spot and the struggle to get it over the line, which coincided with the worsening Local Government financial crisis. This transformed a public realm consultation project to a youth-led co-design programme; then to a panicky community fundraising campaign as municipal funding for the skateable parts of the space vanished into thin air; and finally to frantic, all-hands-on-deck labour before the heras fencing came down – when Skate Nottingham’s team and other volunteers found ourselves responsible for more and more tasks. We donned high-vis and pulled insanely long days in sub-zero temperatures to do everything from installing the corten steel forms (based on the designs of all those young people) with the team from Betongpark, coating the whole space with a densifier and then a sealant to try to ensure its performance and longevity, filling in all the gaps between the concrete units, and then sweeping, sweeping and sweeping again (to this day), as construction dust gave way to the continuous industrial-level littering of a small but persistent minority of Nottingham College’s student body. Something which we still seem to be weirdly responsible for, standing Canut-like against the unending waves of vape paraphernalia, energy drink cans, squidgy sweets and discarded roaches.
What the film shows is the triumph of the outcome. Against pretty much all odds Nottingham achieved the UK’s first centrally located, all-weather ‘skate friendly’ public space – establishing a blueprint for similar sites now being planned across the country, from London Boroughs to multiple market towns and regional capitals. This was during a time when Nottingham had the lowest Gross Disposable Household Income bar nowhere (recently pipped by Leicester… commiserations to our friends to the south); had the lowest Youth Opportunity Index ranking nationwide; within the East Midlands region, which has had the lowest level of public investment per capita of any of the UK’s regions or nations. Tram Line Spot is used positively by hundreds of children, young people and adults every week. It has hosted two large scale commercially sponsored public events (in April 2023, with DC Shoes and Supereight, and April 2024, with Samsung UK), bringing investment and excitement into the city at no cost to the public purse.
Tram Line Spot has since been the location of almost continuous free skate coaching sessions, creative workshops, youth development, women & girls only sessions, jams, comps and design-and-build workshops, kindly funded by the National Lottery, the Department for Culture, Media and Sport, and Sport England. This film tries to jump-start the powers-that-be into feeling some level of pride in all this.
What this film doesn’t show is the continued struggles to keep the city lively, safe and creative in the face of once-in-a-generation challenges. Skate Nottingham has very much stood alone in Tram Line Spot and Sussex Street more widely, fundraising for our activities independently and remaining the only youth-oriented provider consistently active in this location. Although frustrated and exhausted by this, especially as young skateboarders, “our kids” goddammit, have been unfairly scapegoated for ASB and other incidents far outside of their responsibility or control; we are also very proud. Those other much better-resourced sports might have retreated to their cathedrals of the spectacular, outside the city’s limits, but Nottingham’s skateboarders remain stubbornly present in the city centre and the inner-city estates. When invited to talk about our struggles and triumphs in Bordeaux earlier this month, alongside 1,200 other skaters, urban planners, architects, designers, skatepark companies and brand representatives, we were proud to show how we’ve dug in and “held the f*cking line” in the face of hurricane-strength forces that are causing our young people’s experiences of urban spaces to become less safe and less welcoming.
But when it comes to the wider city of Nottingham, we are, of course, not alone. Parallel to spaces like Tram Line Spot, we’ve seen the explosion of activity from the urban greening and ‘guerrilla gardening’ movements, with heroes like Jack and Grow Notts CIC and Nottz Garden Project bringing a steady stream of new, community-maintained green spaces, pop-up planters and pocket gardens to most corners of the city, including by Tram Line Spot. Whilst many other mainstream actors have withdrawn from the public realm, the contemporary and alternative arts scene have also stepped up – with the work of friends like FFWIH, Emily Catherine, Dilk, Small Kid and Scarce decorating the city, including its grimmer spaces with colour and weird imagination, whilst initiatives like Art Fest Notts and the ever-impressive Green Hustle drag the city forwards towards a more sustainable, creative tomorrow. We’ve had incredible support from the galleries, including The Nottingham Contemporary, who overlook Tram Line Spot, and Backlit Gallery, where we’re headquartered. And many officers at Nottingham City Council, especially in the Major Projects and Public Realm teams have gone above and beyond – somehow – for years now.
Striving to make transformative stuff happen in Nottingham feels like being part of the crew of a sinking warship – holed fatally below the waterline – remaining at our posts to keep the guns desperately firing at the hostile sky instead of fleeing to the life rafts. Although it feels like cold water will rush over our heads at any moment, it also makes my heart almost literally burst that none of us are giving up and maybe, if we grab onto these stories of hope and resilience tightly enough, this hokey maritime metaphor will, against the odds, limp back to port for the repair, refit and re-launch Nottingham has been crying out for this last decade plus.
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