Cities across the UK are embracing skateboarding. Is Manchester next?

Gooseside skate park sits a waddle or two south from the Rochdale Canal, hence the name. One of the regular skaters there, Roisin, describes it as a place where skater and goose hang happily together. “And geese are so shitty,” she says, “so if they like us, we must be alright you know.” More commonly known as Ancoats Central Retail Park, the derelict 10.5 acre site was once home to a number of borderline-defunct retail classics (see: Toys 'R Us, Mothercare). 

Now it’s Manchester’s largest DIY skate park — a park made entirely by the skaters themselves out of found objects, litter, and hand-mixed concrete. Among its various self-descriptively named obstacles are a hip, a bank, a curb, a concrete corner, and a bright-green mini-ramp donated to them in January after being used in a Weetabix ad. 

Two weeks ago, the council approved a planning application for the Central Retail Park to be flattened and transformed into a nine-storey office building, and a three-playgrounded park. Most people either support the development or they couldn’t care less — the site is, for the most part, a rubbish-strewn wasteland. What matters is that within it lies a community; the only space in the city centre for skaters to skate without being hassled by the public, thrown out by security guards, or asked to cough up a tenner. 

The question is not why Gooseside is being demolished, or even whether it should be or not, but rather: why is a community-built, illegal skate park in a dumping ground the only free and accessible skate park in the whole of central Manchester? Perhaps more crucially, does this lack of skate parks suggest a wider problem, namely a lack of areas in the city centre where people can exist – and even have fun – without spending money?

This city noticeably lacks areas for congregating freely and for free. We have a scattering of public parks, but these are out of action for approximately two thirds of your typical English year. The city centre for a long time has been geared towards shopping, eating, boozing, and organised, price-tagged fun. We’re lucky to have a number of free museums, but where here makes space for proper, costless, ruleless play? “Apart from on the dancefloor, adults don’t get to play much,” says long-time skateboarder Tal. “That’s taken away from us at a very young age.”

Tal moved here in 2021 after living in Cambridge, London, and Nairobi. This only goes so far to explain her accent, which veers more roadman-wards than is justified by a few years spent in the capital. She goes to Gooseside, and visits other skate parks in the outskirts of the city, but ultimately, she prefers to skate on the streets. “I love street skating more than anything in the world,” she says, “because it gives you a chance to be surprised by the city you live in. It changes the way you relate to the city. It changes the things that you see.” Tal explains that street skating creates an opportunity for chance encounters with people you’d never usually meet — like getting to know the city’s rough sleepers, or having drunk strangers asking her if they can kickflip on her board.

Tal arrived here just as the first lockdown was imposed, and skating at Whitworth Park was becoming a commonplace hobby. “It marked the birth of skateboarding being for everyone,” she explains. “Women were skateboarding, over-thirties were skateboarding, it wasn’t this socially policed thing.” After Whitworth Park, St Peters Square became a hotspot, swiftly followed by Lincoln Square. By the summer of 2022, Gooseside DIY was taking shape. “That summer it just popped off,” says Tal, “It put Manchester on the map. People would travel from all over the world to skate at Gooseside.”

However, not everyone was hugely pleased with the city’s newfound hobby. In Lincoln Square, Labour councillors complained of damaged benches, visitors sitting on said benches complained of being asked when they were going to move, and parishioners at the nearby St Mary’s church complained of too much clattering about during Mass. And so, one by one, all the best street skating spots in Manchester were skate-stopped.

For those of you who, like myself, have never even managed that one skating trick where you get two feet on the board at once — skate-stopping is a form of hostile architecture, designed to stop skaters from grinding on handrails, benches, kerbs, monuments in honour of colonial powers, and the like. You’ll see it everywhere once you look for it, on Oxford Road where upturned bricks jut out of the pavement, or in St Ann’s Square where rough indents line the rounded sides of the public fountain.

Lincoln Square was skate-stopped in October of last year, and the other popular spots followed shortly afterwards. Still, the heyday of Manchester’s skating community has never quite settled down. “It’s ironic, because it’s one of the worst places I’ve ever skated,” Tal explains. “It’s raining every day. The concrete isn’t very good, and most of our spots are skate-stopped. But at the same time it has more passionate skateboarders than I’ve seen anywhere else in the world.”

So when the street spots were skate-stopped, where did Manchester’s passionate skateboarders go? Projekts MCR, the caged-up indoor park beneath the Mancunian Way flyover, is a popular spot, but it costs a tenner a visit. Same with Graystone indoor skate park in Salford, and anyway, that’s in Salford. The nearest free skate park to the city centre is Hulme Skate Park, which was by all accounts designed appallingly and without the consultation of skaters. Platt Fields skate park was rotting so badly by the time it was demolished a few weeks ago that no one was particularly upset.

The upshot of all this was that most of the skaters found themselves left with the DIYs. Gooseside is the biggest and the most central, but there are others. Sam, a 37-year-old skater, comes to meet me, rather surprisingly, by bicycle. He shows me around the only DIY in Manchester not imminently set to be demolished — and asks that I refrain from mentioning its name or location lest that shortly change. 

We enter through a gap in a metal fence, into a hard clearing in an otherwise small and birch-filled woodland. The park has been out of action since the start of winter, and the various ramps and ledges are nested between layers of dead leaves and detritus, ready to be swept away when the skaters emerge once more in spring.

The DIY started in 2019, when a small group of skateboarders either spotted the hole in the fence and climbed in or spotted the clearing itself and climbed over. It was summer, and leaves shrouded the clearing out of sight. Pushing away the layer of mud and moss that thickened the woodland floor, they discovered that beneath it was a surface of hard, grey concrete, resembling a long-disused car park. In a matter of months, they had cleared the debris from the ground entirely, and began work on a new DIY park.

“It’s just as much about having control over an environment than it is about having a skatepark,” says Sam. He explains that DIY parks provide an increasingly rare opportunity for a community to take charge of their own surroundings, and that many more people in the community have taken the woodlands into their own hands, inspired by the DIY. Local growers found a sunny clearing within the trees, and started their own allotments. One nearby resident started his own forest school there for a little while, a local GP attempted to use the space to help patients with their mental health, and the local Gurdwara got involved, too, offering their outdoor tap to the skaters so that they could hand-mix concrete for the ramps.

But it wasn’t until 2021 that the DIY skate park really took off. Sam agrees that lockdown, and moreover the introduction of skateboarding to the Olympics that year, saw a huge increase in popularity and diversity for the sport. Suddenly, more kids were walking around with skateboards and, notably, more girls. The Olympics awarded skateboarding a sense of legitimacy, he explains, and soon enough parents were encouraging their children to visit the park. “I’m not saying it was full of kids, but there were kids coming in here, and we felt like we were doing something positive.”

Sam wasn’t one of the original discoverers of the space, but was instrumental in its revitalisation in 2021. He walks me through the skate park’s anatomically-named obstacles – a spine, a hip, a hump – and explains how they were made. Pale red bricks form the outer structures, which are subsequently filled with pebbles and litter, and then covered in concrete. “Inside all of these is just like, bottles and cans,” he says, gesturing to the various ramps and ledges. “None of this is perfect,” Sam says. “None of us are builders. But the way that it’s been laid out comes from knowing what we want.”

This is a major issue with a number of skate parks in Manchester: That they’re not designed with skaters’ needs in mind. Sam tells me about a generation of skate parks built in Manchester in the ‘90s, when the council briefly saw the value of investing in them for youth, but didn’t actually consult skateboarders about their design. These parks are counterintuitive at best, downright dangerous at worst. Aforementioned skater and goose-friend Roisin will later tell me something similar about Hulme Skate Park, which she describes as “a bit of a death wish,” with “big-ass metal ramps that make no sense,” and a soft floor that crumbles easily and is permanently studded with shards of broken glass.

Sam is exasperated by the situation. “I do think it’s absolutely mad that Manchester has such a vibrant community of skateboarders, and yet what do we have?” he asks. “Everywhere that’s seen as a starting point for skateboarding gets taken away.”

As Sam tells it, this is because skateboarding is still viewed by Manchester City Council as anti-social, a viewpoint that has long become outdated, even across the UK. In Sheffield, the ‘Mairoland’ area of Exchange Street was turned into England’s first inner-city skateable public space — a move that was deliberately designed to combat the drug dealing, alcohol abuse, and violence on the street. “Suddenly it became safer for people, because skateboarders are a presence for good,” Sam says. “We’re not gonna mug you, we’re accountable. We tend to care about where we live.” Over in Glasgow, when the Transport Museum discovered that it had inadvertently become a popular skating spot, it decided to deliberately make the building more skateable, in order to attract a younger crowd to its otherwise hard-to-market exhibitions about trams. 

This is what Sam would like for the DIY — for the council to work with them, not against them. He actively encourages the council to develop the space, telling me that the dream is for it to be turned into a public park. “The rest could be a playground, an allotment, all kinds of stuff,” he says. “But there would be a skate park here. There would be a legacy, and we’d be consulted on how it’s built.”

To be factored into development plans is what most of the skaters at Gooseside DIY would like too, as I find out from talking to Roisin. She’s been living and skating in Manchester since Ancoats Central Retail Park still sold Action Men, but she grew up near Wolverhampton, in the kind of town she doesn’t tell me the name of because I wouldn’t know it anyway. 

Roisin was one of many skaters who wrote a response to the Central Retail Park planning application, requesting that they include a skate park in their plans. “I just got Manchester Council’s aims and objectives,” she says, “and then wrote out how they were contradicting every single one.” Among these are ‘people’ and ‘place’ — objectives that Roisin argues the new development directly opposes, as it fails to recognise the legitimate needs of the existing community. What, after all, is the point of creating a brand-new public place, if building it pushes out the very people it should be for? 

Similarly to Sam, Roisin suggests that the main reason the council doesn’t actively invest in the skateboarding community is due to outdated views on skateboarders themselves. “People need to get their heads out their arses about what they think a skater is,” she says, telling me that she herself works in events, and that many of her skateboarding friends are young professionals. “I contribute to society, I work really hard,” she says. “If I need to be a robot, I’m a better robot when I can skate on my lunch break.”

There is, however, hopefully, positive news on the horizon. When I spoke to the Manchester City Council, they told me that they’d recently secured £50k to develop proposals for a new skate park in Chorlton Park. Platt Fields and Hulme Park, too, have been eyed-up for new development, and this time they’ve assured me that they’d like the insight of Manchester’s skating community— presumably to avoid a repeat of the death-trap-ramps and plywood quarter pipes. They agreed about the positive impact that skateboarding can bring to the city: the social impact, and encouraging young people to be active.

For Tal though, this is just a small part of what skateboarding can do for a city. It’s not just a sport, she argues, it’s also an artform, a culture, a community. “For us as skateboarders,” she says, “it’s important for us to position ourselves as a community that has a shared ethos, and a resource that can be used by the city.” This cultural capital — the ability to repurpose and reimagine the otherwise drabbest and most avoidable parts of Manchester (like Ancoats Central Retail Park) into their very own public playground, is the secret that skaters bring to our streets. “We love the city,” says Tal. “We bring people together. That is an asset to the city, regardless of what commercial value it has.”