You can’t move history: Young skateboarders reclaim urban space from redevelopment

Engaging Youth in Cultural Heritage, an AHRC-funded project (2014-2016), was designed and directed by Prof Pollyanna Ruiz (University of Sussex), with colleagues from Glasgow (Madgin), East Anglia (Snelson), and Newcastle (Webb).

The research aimed to follow the Long Live Southbank (LLSB) campaign that was established by the Undercroft community to save the site. Initially, the team set out to explore what was particularly special, irreplaceable and unmoveable about this site.

To understand these young people’s experiences and engagements with (sub)cultural heritage and political activism, the research project set out to explore the following questions, through the development of the film:

• Can the subaltern speak in heritage?
• What were the skaters saying?
• How did the skaters say it?
• Were the skaters heard?

The Southbank Centre sits on a part of the River Thames that was developed for the Festival of Britain in 1951. In the words of the skaters (research participants), the Undercroft – which lies beneath the Southbank Centre – was ‘left over’ space and has, over the years, been used to park cars, store bins and to shelter the homeless. It was ‘space that nobody wanted’ that was quickly discovered to be ‘absolutely perfect’ for street-skating and, as a result, has been used by successive generations of skaters since 1973. As the commercial value of the land increased, the decision was taken in 2013 to remove the skaters from the site in order to open retail units with the potential to fund the Southbank Centre’s ambitious redevelopment programme (Long Live Southbank – LLSB).

The Southbank Centre was mindful of the skater community and planned to build a new purpose-built skate park a few hundred metres down the river under Hungerford Bridge. However, their offer was rejected by many of the skaters who felt that their efforts to engage them were exclusionary (‘top-down’, corporate frameworks such as formal emails and designated discursive spaces) and positioned the skaters as ‘users’ of the space, rather than as a community actively engaged in the production of (sub)cultural spaces.

The breakdown in communication which characterised the early stages of this relationship with the Southbank Centre was rooted not in the skaters’ failure to speak in their own voice, but in the Southbank Centre’s failure to hear those voices (through a mismatch in methods).

The skaters then developed the LLSB campaign, which aimed to articulate to both policymakers and the wider public the value of the cultural practices which took place in the Undercroft.

This campaign cut to the heart of heritage debates: what makes a space valuable and who gets to decide this?

Amongst its outputs was a co-produced film, screened to an audience of arts and heritage policymakers (including the Director of Policy and Planning at the Southbank Centre), and which enabled Southbank Centre representatives to recognise the ‘blind spot’ they had in relation to the Undercroft.

By working with the skaters to communicate these concepts, the film and broader project helped create a newly collaborative relationship between the Long Live Southbank (LLSB) campaign and the Southbank Centre, resulting in the restoration of the Undercroft and the creation of a Children and Young People’s Centre. It informed a new grant programme for young people from the Heritage Lottery Fund (Kick the Dust), whose Head of Historic Environment said: “I try and use [the project] where I can around getting people to rethink their notion of heritage, both policy-makers, potential grant applicants or stakeholders”.

You Can’t Move History won best film in the AHRC’s Research in Film Awards 2016. The panel noted that “this remarkable piece of work challenges easy assumptions about heritage and creates a fascinating portrait of contemporary urban outsiderness in the process”.

What happened

The research team used a combination of oral histories, filmed walking interviews, visual and documentary analysis, and a workshop, to examine young people’s attachments to the Undercroft over its forty-year history, as well as the perspectives of those involved in difference capacities with the construction of heritage policy and planning decisions.

The research team also wanted to capture and convey the sensory experiences and emotions of the Undercroft community, and the ways in which the skaters interacted with the space. They worked in collaboration with Paul Richards from BrazenBunch, and a long-time Southbank skater and filmmaker Winstan Whitter, to produce a 20-minute film entitled You Can’t Move History (2016). The film combines the sounds and sights of the skating experience, with photos, documents and contemporary footage from the walking interviews with project contributors.

While the research team had planned to develop some sort of non-academic output alongside traditional articles, it was only when they observed that the skaters were constantly making and sharing films, that they realised this output needed to be a film. They recognised how integral filmmaking was to the skaters’ practice and their shared ‘language’, using it to connect and communicate with and beyond their networks.

The skaters did all the work of physically making the film. The academic team drafted the research questions and film narrative, in conversation with the skaters. While the academics conducted the interviews, the skaters filmed, sound-recorded, made aesthetic edits and reviewed the film for factual accuracy.

The workshop programme was initially outlined by the researchers, but then further shaped in conversation with the skaters. 

Another important aspect of the project was a workshop in which a panel of skaters talked for an hour to the Director of the Southbank Centre, representatives from Lambeth City Council and other key decisionmakers. The setup required this audience to simply listen to groups of people who commonly aren’t heard, which was transformative for both sides.

This workshop was held at the House of Vans,a strategically important choice. The team had resource and access to use more formal spaces, but the fact that the policymakers were required to meet the skaters in their ‘home territory’ helped give the latter confidence to communicate their case and help the former to better understand this community and its culture.

The team did discuss whether they should seek the skaters’ views on the academic article and report but decided against this. They did this partly because the core messages had already been carefully discussed and agreed via the film/workshop conversations.

Findings and new knowledge

The extensive ethnographic research revealed the value of the Undercroft as a ‘found space’ for skateboarding, which embodies subcultural experience and knowledge (subcultural heritage, subcultural memory).

In their academic outputs, the team proposed that embodied experiences of – and emotional attachments to – the Southbank Undercroft were crucial components of both found space and citizen expertise. They argued that the concept of found space is broadly analogous to authenticity, as defined in a number of international heritage charters. The ‘feel’ of the Undercroft was a central element of why history could not be moved and more broadly opened a discussion on why some historic places are seen as so important that they cannot be replicated or demolished. 

It proposed new frameworks for thinking about the political nature of young people’s bodily knowledge and experiences, and the implications of this for the communication of (sub)cultural value, e.g. skateboarding, as a form of action art.

Crucial to the success of the project was the co-production of many of its main outputs (except the project report and academic articles); the skaters made the film, website and contributed greatly to the workshop programme. They were free to use the film in any way they liked, the research team considered it theirs as much as ours.

The initial aim underpinning the project funding bid was ‘help the skaters’, but it quickly became apparent that this had been an assumption; their inputs to the project and their emerging campaign demonstrated that they were competent, intelligent and determined.

The research team realised they felt an ‘expert deficit,’ recognising that they were learning from the skaters, about: how they use social networks; the importance of face-to-face communication; and their knowledge of the ‘history’ of the space in an extraordinarily different way (e.g. in relation to predecessors’ notable skating achievements).

This made the team think carefully about the roles of different expertise in an effective collaboration.

In some ways, the lack of shared knowledge and language between the researchers (who initially knew little about skating culture and felt out of place approaching the Undercroft) and the skaters (who were wary of ‘authority’ by this point in their campaign) was a challenge that became an opportunity. By demonstrating that they were coming into this setting with an open mind, a genuine interest and ready to learn, the researchers were inviting the skaters to start to teach them their knowledge.

This process helped to dispel any perceived hierarchical dynamics, build trust, and gave the skaters a process through which they could find the most effective words, visuals and sounds, to convey to others the importance of the space and how they use it. They were able to lift these concepts out of the dynamic in which the skaters were deeply embedded, to see them more clearly from alternate/outside perspectives, which in turn helped them articulate these to others.

In turn, the skaters’ access to the project’s academic insights and outputs – having been produced and published using research standards and methodologies – were helpful to them, as a way of reinforcing and validating their campaign. For example, they routinely sent the link to the film when communicating with new policy makers, it became a quick and easy way for them to engage with those who did not have pre-existing knowledge of the Undercroft and its history.

The threat to the Undercroft posed by the Southbank Centre’s redevelopment plans required the skate community to develop and evolve their bodily understandings and inhabitant knowledge into a more overtly political form of communication. Moreover, the need to communicate with policymakers and the wider public in a language beyond that of skating brought different generations of skaters together and created a more sophisticated self-understanding of the ‘community’. This was recognised by a director from the Southbank Centre who rather ruefully commented that ‘the paradox here is that it took the Save campaign for them to articulate what it was that was special about the space which they couldn’t have told me, even if I asked, before that’. (Look at What we Made, 2019).

Lessons

Whilst the reliance on interviews with skaters, campaigners and policymakers directly involved with the conflict over the future of the Undercroft limited the range of voices available for analysis, it did enable the team to develop a real depth of understanding.

The collaborative filmmaking method worked particularly well in this context, for several reasons; film was a very familiar medium for the skaters, so they had the skills to collaborate on its production, existing networks/audiences to distribute it, and making it helped them develop new ways to articulate and communicate their messages.

The team reflects that a similar project with a different community (with different skills, using different communication platforms) may need to use different methods, or manage their expectations about how effective it might be as a collaborative communication tool.

The research project received Ethics Approval via the University of Sussex and developed the necessary documentation including information sheets and consent forms. One unanticipated challenge they faced was that several of the skaters didn’t see the necessity of giving formal consent – they held the attitude that they were filming and featuring in peer-created video content on a regular basis, so didn’t see the point or benefit of this additional paperwork. The researchers then had the challenge of trying to communicate its relevance and persuade them to follow due process.

Another reflection was around ownership.Collaboration and co-ownership were central to the project’s ethos, though ‘on paper’ (as is the nature of publicly-funded research projects) the work technically belonged to the Universities and ultimately the funder. This worked well enough while all involved felt they ‘shared’ the work (both in terms of inputs and outputs), but there were occasions where the question of ownership (i.e. the mismatch between the formal documentation and informal ethos) was challenged. The team acknowledge that this could have been mitigated with more explicit upfront discussion on ownership, its implications and how these would affect the project as it played out.