Stockwell.

The last time I had a vacation.

Since the Stockwell park has a bunch of coverage in the latest issue of Thrasher, I figured this is a good moment to write about when I visited the place.

At the end of the 1990s, my friend Rob went to England as part of a college study abroad program. He wound up liking it and staying there. In the twenty years he has been in the UK, he found a job, got married, and has three kids. The move worked out great for him.

A bunch of us hopped across the pond for Rob's wedding in February of 2004. Although Paul and I brought our boards, we never really got to roll. I wanted to skate with the kids doing tricks on the curb at the bus station in Wales when we first arrived, but nobody else shared my enthusiasm. It might also have been slightly raining. Anyway, we had a fantastic time in the Welsh countryside and then being tourists in London.

We stayed at Rob and his wife's flat while they were on their honeymoon. They lived very close to the Crystal Palace area, which I recognized immediately as the home turf of former Schmitt Stix and New Deal pro Steve Douglas. Even though it was February, the weather was decent enough that skateboarding could have happened. Rob lived a short bus ride away from Stockwell. Paul and I missed out simply by being clueless about our exact location.

I went back to England in August of 2006 for a vacation. Rob was still in the same neighborhood so I planned a little better this trip. I got the last crack at the guest room because it was slated to become a nursery shortly after I left. I knew Stockwell was close by and worked out how to get there. I spent a Saturday afternoon carving around the bowls and doing some ollies.

It was cool to skate an artifact of skateboarding history. Stockwell was built in 1978 and has had a few surface upgrades and mild remodels over the years. The park is surrounded by houses and an apartment complex. It is similar to a snake run with a kind of deep bowl at the end. That's the part you see in photos where guys are doing tricks over the wall and into the street. The locals started to add some DIY quarterpipes and ledges as that was becoming a trend in the middle 2000s. The surface was a tad strange. It was sort of grippy and the ground felt oddly hollow when you would ollie. It took a little bit of getting used to. I really enjoyed the park and wished I had more time to skateboard at it when I was there. It's totally worth checking out if you wind up in that corner of the world.