BMX Chris Hill-Scott’s photo blog

This was the first full-length article I wrote for Ride UK. Originally published in issue 118, October 2008, written around June 2008.

Nan Goldin maintains the only people you really have the right to photograph are your own tribe. And my tribe for the last four years has become a group of BMX riders in and around the UK’s largest town, Reading. Before I came here for university I’d already been riding for about four years and now I’m graduating and moving on.

…BMX also exists in the most ordinary places, and it doesn’t get much more ordinary than Reading.What’s really great about BMX is that it exists wherever you go, from the polished glass and chipped marble of a financial centre, spade-sculpted woods away in the countryside or to the Favelas of Rio-de-Janerio (see Bruce Crisman’s video about Alessandro Lima Terres). But it also exists in the most ordinary of places, and it doesn’t get much more ordinary than Reading. From the moderately successful football team that people get immoderately fervent about, to drowning the week in vodka mixed with unfamiliar brands of energy drink. Points on your license and another strappy top from H&M. “Sluts” and DIY. The M4 motorway snakes around it, railway lines fan out towards London, the major cities of the North, South and West, and other parts of the commuter belt. The town drains into waterways which once trafficked people and things. It’s somewhere you pass through on the way to someplace else—Reading is a hundred and forty thousand people who missed their connecting train.

It’s rarely the grim, honest hardship romanticised in Arctic Monkey’s songs and episodes of Shameless; only a home-counties poverty of aspiration instead. The only people I’ve met here who it hasn’t completely ruined have been the ones who ride. BMX is doing something with your life, but not in a context that people who don’t ride can hope to understand it. A meaningful act within BMX is what you define it as, and, by extension, what your tribe defines it as. It’s not the one-way diktat of society at large; maintaining a dysfunctional relationship, school, choosing the right car or celebrating three-one. Such achievements aren’t so pressing if BMX is a more interesting fiction, and sometimes it requires the tribe to unwittingly nourish that conviction.

Whether you’re exploring your surroundings as part of growing up or, like me, as a migrant, a bike—any kind of bike—is a pretty good vehicle. You’re not boxed in like a driver, but you can get around a lot faster than by walking. Whatever impression you form of a place defines who you are as much as any interpersonal relationship does. Whatever impression you form is going to be subjective based on your interactions with the place, but it’s less misinformed if you take in the ordinary as well as the noteworthy. Because riding BMX enforces a different engagement with your surroundings you see the dull parts of a place no-one else bothers with. And because BMX gives you this unique engagement with your surroundings it’s a way of exerting your identity back upon a place. There’s nowhere more important for that to happen than somewhere as dehumanisingly ordinary as Reading.

In the film Happiness there’s a scene where one of the characters is talking about the place she lives:

Y’know, people are always putting New Jersey down. None of my friends can believe I live here. But that’s because they don’t get it: I’m living in a state of irony.

As a satellite to somewhere ostensibly more exciting, Reading has some parallels with Newark, New Jersey, where the film is set. But irony admits defeat: It’s better to engage with what you’ve got, which is why there’s a good scene here, even if it’s not somewhere many people travel to as BMX tourists.

We have an assortment of small outdoor council skateparks, which run the gamut from fun to shameful wastes of tens of thousands of pounds. The council also provide a racetrack, but like many of the skateparks it’s in one of the worst parts of town (so read run-down, littered with broken glass or no place to go alone). Somewhat better outdoor parks can be found in nearby towns like Farnborough, Bracknell and Maidenhead, along with the similar scenes that form around them. There aren’t any indoor parks within an hour’s drive, but various people have been trying to get one running since before I came here and it looks their efforts might pay off sometime in the not so distant future.

Most of the street spots look better than they ride, but there’s enough variety to keep life spiced. The town is sufficiently sprawling to find new things to ride every once in a while, and occasionally a new construction brings a new spot with it. Having lots of large office buildings and a university helps (although both are conscious of BMX and skateboarding so there’s no shortage of skatestoppers and jobsworthy security guards). Most importantly there are enough people who are willing to spend a few hours after work hitting up spots, or taking a pedal to scout out somewhere promising.

Trails come and go; Knowlhill, for example, got knocked down soon after I moved here. But there are always people digging, and when summer comes around there’s always something running. We’re now lucky enough to have people nearby who rent land or have built stuff in their gardens, so something more permanent is available, for the moment at least. Even if there’s no riding happening, a trip to the trails is always a good excuse to eat barbequed food and hang out in the woods with friends.

So this article isn’t as much a goodbye to Reading as it is a thank you to the only people who could have made it feel like home, the people who have written me into the collective fiction we tell each other to make sense of this place. I’m not sure what story I’d be telling myself (and recounting to you) if it wasn’t for this lot so the least I can do is get their names printed in a magazine: Here’s to Adam K, Babs, Bateman, Bowen, Brash, Cameron, Dan, Dias, Fat Sam, Flatland James, Gary Gurner, George, Greg, Guy, Jim, Joe, Josh, Konstant, Kurt, John Wells, Leon, Little John, Matty, Max, Merlin, Nate, Paton, PullBackAndYank.com Sam, Peeling, Polski Mateusz, Reece, Ricky, Roland, Ryan, Sam S, Sharpie, Shitbag, Sick Ant, Sid, Sketcher Kris and Whitey.

—

About eight years ago, a Cheltenham local made a pilgrimage to Livingston skatepark. I was sixteen, he was a postman and used to unorthodox hours. He drove the 350 miles, slept overnight in the car, rode out the AM, and then returned—a loop stretched flat as an elastic band round a single envelope. His trip was interpreted as an Alan Partridge-esque, barefoot, Tobelerone-gobbling, private breakdown. People talked about it more than they asked him about it. I recalled it while en route to Livingston myself, in the company of six other Cheltonians (no, really, Cheltonians).

Neither journey was setting a road trip precedent, which is unsurprising given how claustrophobic a little place the UK can be. Column inches of population increases; square miles ceded gradually to the sea. A nation of Top Gear watchers: the mentality that everyone else is out to interfere with your right to do whatever-the-fuck-you-want, viz. spin your car in smokey circles in peace, patronise the life out of any other nationality, or most of all, comatise yourself to a flickering, televisual depiction of televisual characters indulging said rights. A kind of paranoia that perhaps, unchecked, leads to a brief period of feral existence punctuated by the gunning-down of those who you feel are interfering with your right to do whatever-the fuck-you-want. Which well described our trip (with BMX in place of killing anyway—the only shotgunning was of the front seat).

The plan was to be away five days, i.e. four nights spent camping in the wild. The first day was mostly driving, aiming to get somewhere into Scotland. Turning off the motorway into Moffat, we stumbled across a mini ramp, whose unworn paint gave its metal surface the affordances of wood. The unvarnished awe of the gathering teenagers made it obvious that it had never been used in earnest, least of all by them. We left them—sharing their single of bottle of beer—down a road on which they described there being “fuck all till Edinburgh”. By the last light we made a right down another road, narrower, unmarked; its verges bristling at the wheelarches. As the first light crested the horizon somewhere way, way easterly and we crested the road’s final hill, a brutalist concrete structure emerged into view. Seconds later, a vast reservoir expanded out behind it. The final hill turned out to be the embankment of a dam. We explored the shoreline’s eerie silence until we were satisfied it manifested absence and not lurking menace, and along it made camp.

Livingston was day two’s first stop, which met every expectation a 700 mile solo round trip afforded it in the eyes of a sixteen year-old boy. After that was Edinburgh’s new concrete park (Saughton). According to a local it’s not too busy before nine AM, or after eleven PM (though the lights go out at ten, and it’s probably not the kind of place you’d want to be after dark, potential for endless runs or otherwise).

As a consequence of the crowded skatepark we left with plenty of time to get west to Glasgow, then north along Loch Lomond where the road, railway and not much else squeezed into the space between hill and shore. Jutting out from this corridor and into the loch was a small peninsula, out along which we carried ourselves, our tents and Morrissons carrier bags, laden with what seemed like the last vestiges of fluorescent-lit civilisation. Above our campsite rose a hillock verdant with ferns. We gathered branches from the trees which had failed to cling to its steep sides. We gathered driftwood from the beach that looked out onto the rest of the loch. We arranged our tents in a circle, around a circle of stones, and made a fire at its center. The swoop of full-beams confined to the distance. It could not have been more idyllic.

It wasn’t until the third day that our family camping holiday went awry.

The morning started alright, a dip in the loch at least partially washing off the smell of fire. By the time we got to bundling ourselves back into the cars the fine mist rolling down the hillside had coalesced into something more like rain. We made for Unit 23, Dumbarton’s indoor skatepark, whose prime attraction is a voluminous wooden bowl. It’s rare to ride something which has totally alien aspects, whose contours you can’t map onto some previous experience and adjust to accordingly. As indoor skateparks go, it was pretty exciting. After leaving there (and making another trip to the supermarket, because that’s just the kind of primal hunter-gatherers we are) it was getting late to be finding a camp. As it became less and less likely that we were going to settle on a spot the decision got made: leave for home now and be in bed by 2:30AM. And so began our own pilgrimage back down the M6, in the finest tradition, themed by the overconsumption of energy drink—as Partridge with Toblerone—dispatching the spent cans out of the car window like shotgun cartridges. We didn’t reach Cheltenham until 4:30AM.

It was our giving in to the mania of the UK road trip. Accepting it. Allowing it within. Acknowledging that it’s less the fear that people are out to interfere with your desire to do whatever-the-fuck-you-want, but that whatever-the-fuck-you-want won’t be enough. That it won’t be close enough whilst still under the same pebbledash clouds, eating service-station BLTs. Save for these three days in Scotland when we made it enough: held out for as long as that understanding required.

* * *

You might also like to see Jamie's edit of the trip or Luke's photos from the trip.

—