PT.1 Interview - 3D Printing, Local Councils and Communication with Skate Southampton

This interview with Skate Southhampton is somewhat of a continuation about concrete following the conversation we had with Polish Don't Demolish earlier this year.

The group alongside Richard Holland and Bedir Bekar recently completed their 'Reshaping The Square' project which in their words "...is inspired by the idea of approaching our city as a playground and exploring how architectural forms and sculptures can be deployed to encourage community engagement, promote physical literacy, develop strong connections with culture and improve mental health." 

The project led by Skate Southhampton utilised consultations and workshops into the creation of skateable concrete sculptures. The physical pieces are now situated at Southampton's Guildhall Square and Hogland Skate Park which the group are also working on for redevelopment. 

The following interview was conducted on 24/07/2023 with Steve Béga the founder of Skate Southampton.

Words by Fraser. 

What’s the Skate Southampton origin story?

Starting Skate Southampton… There basically was a skatepark closer to me in the New Forest which is 10 minutes outside the city, and we got together and redeveloped it really quickly, the council had the money and wanted it to happen, we got some grants bang it was done. It’s the same story across the country but we decided to carry that energy into Southampton. We knew it would be more of an uphill battle from there. 

We came to the city with the idea of taking the term ‘skateboarding’, and whenever anyone hears the word ‘skateboarding' or something associated with it has a positive reaction to it. So whatever we can do to achieve that, by making fun or cool we’ll make that happen. That could happen because we had an old skatepark that would be put up and taken down again every year for a boat show, overtime bits went missing and one year it just never got put back up.  

Skaters just started hitting up Guildhall Square, which is where most of the a loca gallery had put up sculptures and that got mixed reviews from various people. A few Conservative councillors weren’t too into it and they attempted to introduce fines which quickly got squashed straightaway, the skaters didn’t feel like it was right but that did lead to real communication between the council and skateboarders. That was happening and then we came off the back of that to continue the conversation. A councillor was saying ‘Oh, we should do a skateboarding festival to celebrate skateboarding.’ and that became the first ever Slamma Event.  

This had been said and people were wondering ‘Who’s going to do it? When’s it going to happen then?’ Was anyone actually trying to make it happen? No. So, I was like let’s do it. It began a whole new line of communication which was breaking down the usual ‘F– the council’ or ‘F— the skaters’. As skateboarders we tend to just sit around and say ‘the city needs to build stuff for us.’ They don’t necessarily. 

We do a weird thing and yes it would be great if councils had a different attitude and loads of money for stuff we want, but the reality is providing spaces for things they don’t understand and are intimidated by is not on top of their agenda. If you want to see those things you’ve got to have the conversation and unfortunately it involves being ‘grown-up’ for want of a better phase, you have to do ‘non-skateboardery’ things with your free time. You have to do meetings and send lots of emails, which isn’t something a lot of people want to do and that in itself is completely fine. If you want to skate you can go skate because that is what skateboarding is all about, but you can’t complain that things aren’t happening if you’re not getting involved or doing something about it and sometimes to make stuff happen in a certain place you have to play the game. 

We're currently lucky, the centre of Southampton town is going through a cultural-redevelopment which means public spaces like our local gallery are around. So I reached out to them and anybody I could, it was really a ‘If you don’t ask, you don’t get’. It sort of goes from speaking to the gallery, making your presence known and figuring out how-to help one another. The gallery has this big space which is reminiscent of the Mark Gonzales Milk Studio performance space and my initial thought was "We need to get in here!".  

How did you establish your relationship with the John Hansard Gallery?

Before the gallery opened they had some stairs and a stage set-up in the square and skateboards were obviously skating it. Coincidentally happened in the same year as the Slamma Event. That space is treated differently and we had to reach out to the council events team, which was a really easy way in because it's a public highway. If the skateboarding was to touch a footpath for example we’d have to deal with a different department which has many hoops to jump through and they have more to worry about. The council ended up putting us in touch with the gallery because they had temporary sculptures which were getting skated anyway and the worry from the council was that the gallery “weren’t too keen on it [skateboarding]”. 

This wasn’t the case at all. The Gallery said “We love the fact that people are skateboarding on these, it shows a different form of interaction with the work, we were going to remove them for your event that’s coming up shall we just keep them out?” That started our incredible relationship with the John Hansard Gallery who ever since have been our best-friend in the square. Their connections with the university and being a national-profile gallery has made them an amazing ally for skateboarding, we’ve got to influence their approach to community events. We put together an exhibition with them initially, then a smaller second exhibition and we are currently working together on our current project. 

We are just one community groups for the “Co-Creating Public Space” alongside Art Asia and Southampton Mela, The Mela Partnership, Black History Month South, Chinese Arts Southampton, Chinese Association of Southampton, Confucius Institute, Kingston Creative Jamaica, Skate Southampton, Southampton Black Archives, Southampton Pride, SPUD, The Stage Door, UP Projects, and videoclub.

What has your community group created with the ‘Co-Creating Public Space’ worked out so far? Have you created a working title?

Our title is ‘Sculptures and the Skateboarding Landscape’, to be honest we’ve used this to push more stuff to explain and demonstrate that skateboarding can be more than just riding the skateboard. We haven’t done this necessarily on purpose but getting involved in the physical act of skateboarding is really hard, it's technically hard to do. 

The initial barrier to entry is really high in skateboarding. How did you navigate that with the general public?

Personally I'm not a fan of skate lessons, which could be a grumpy old man thing to say but I feel that we can offer more through workshops whether that's photography, video editing or design. We were able to show that skateboarding can be a cultural catalyst for everything and people can be involved in skateboarding without skating. I think we did quite well at documenting these one-off events. Skate Nottingham does this stuff all the time almost every week, we each did each thing once and put it all-over our website and that's it. It’s allowed us to become the people to come to if there's anything that revolves around skateboarding in the city.

It feels as if you’ve taken the approach of not trying to take over the scene and mould it, but Skate Southampton has become somewhat of a conversation leader and mediator instead. Would you agree with that?

Yes for sure, as the Olympics were approaching my thought was, we thought if we don’t establish something and if money is put into Southampton for skateboarding because of the inevitable impact of the inclusion of skateboarding we’ll as a city miss out. If the money isn't steered or looked after by skateboarders things might not go well. It would've probably led to short-term fixes such as a few pop-ups and a Team Extreme demo which could’ve been money spent better elsewhere. 

We struggle to get more people involved in all honesty. Up until last year it has been me doing everything, for a while now it may have looked like we have a big team doing a lot but that's not really the case. Last year when the female led group ‘We Skate Soton’ came into it with a new approach and new attitude. They were all up for it whereas a lot of the other skaters just wanted to skate. The scene is obviously thankful and appreciative of the work but that's kind of it from their end.

What does your approach look like to involve more skaters to get involved with Skate Southampton?

We’ve put up polls, surveys and tried to keep our communication to skateboarding as a whole as open as possible but they don’t seem interested. One of my biggest worries with Skate Southampton is that ‘do I make it look unwelcoming’ and we just want to be a voice that makes stuff happen for skateboarding, we’re as wide open as possible. 

I find that quite odd, you have a form on your website to reach out, you pretty much got back to me straight away. That seems to me that the communication is wide-open. 

It's hard to gauge the response here, we have a great scene but it's become disjointed over the years. We had an independent shop in the late 90’s that shut down and a skatepark but as more skateparks began to be dotted around and the skateboarding population grew there hasn't been a central hub to pull people together. 

Skate Southampton has tried to fill that void but it’s just not the same as having a core indy shop, there is JJ’s Skate Shop locally and one in Winchester. JJ’s is literally someone's garage. It's not as if you are in the centre of a town or city where you can meet-up, lurk and be together before going skating. 

The city itself is transient too, there’s a lot of University students because we have two large universities and so you get the waves of people coming and going every year, to reach out to them and create awareness that lasts is quite difficult. 

When you have a large population of students just like Leeds, it comes down to how do you retain not just the students but the students who actively skate.

It can definitely be that, since I’ve been doing Skate Southampton in my spare time whenever I can. I think the only way to create that solid network was if Skate Southampton turned into a CIC which would create part or even full-time job opportunities, which again leads to ‘Who would actually be down for doing that?’. I’m sure it's not just Southampton and is probably a wider or even global thing, but people genuinely feel like they can’t do something. I attribute it to skateboarding and punk stuff but there’s the DIY aspect, you’ve just got to do it yourself and I don’t think people have that. To run an event for example that could be down to the amount of hurdles, they think that councils aren’t going to let us or they just don't want to. 

It all came up during the ‘City Of Culture’ bid, lots of organisations came to get their voices heard and it came up a lot, there seems to be a lot of hurdles for grass-root organisations to plan anything whether that's music or art, it’s just not easy. There's not much space for cheap studio space, if you want an event there’s so much paper-work, the funding too is super difficult. That might change but the processes for anything the Council run can be very slow. The skatepark we've been working on for the past 5 years has still not been changed because it's still going through planning now. Processes can be frustrating to skateboarders who aren’t involved as well as ourselves who have been waiting and waiting.

That's understandable, UK's skateboarding’s reaction to waiting for skate able spaces is something like Bournbrook DIY. So let’s get down to the benches, first off are they temporary skate spaces?

That's the question in itself really, we’re aware that it's quite a radical thing to do. This project has gone through various different stages. We were given £5,000 from SkateboardingGB to do something DIY, our thought was well we can do DIY but let's not just buy a load of concrete. We don’t have any spaces to do things but we have the square. We could do something cool, it is us, it is DIY but we’re not physically building it. We put together a workshop where people could come and design skateable sculptures, again with help from JHG, to go into town with the question ‘What would it be?’. 

It became more about the themes than the physical side of it, themes such as ‘inclusive’, ‘play’ and ‘moveable’ became prominent. At first myself, Richard and Abir Bekar utilised the designs to make mellow Corten Steel stuff, the city has concrete benches which could fit obstacles underneath them too and then they could be moved out of the way by a forklift. They could be placed where the skateboarders already skate too. The Cor-ten Steel worked out as too expensive and already having Richard working with us for the JHG community he was looking into working with 3D printing concrete. 

He came up with simple designs, the benches would cost much less and we’d be utilising a new process which in itself adds another dimension to the project. We just ran with that, the designs took the skateable forms but the thoughts were its a bench, its a stage, it's a plinth, a platform and they are for everyone to use in any way they want but they are skateboarding inspired. We wanted people to use them outside of skateboarding. As soon as they were deployed people sat on them, played music, kids could run over the top of them and do whatever they want. You can’t have a ‘skate-only’ approach, we were inspired by the work in Malmö obviously, you have to have shared space and cities aren’t going to embrace skateboarding more unless you are contributing to everything and taking your turn. 

We don’t necessarily want to create conflict but we hope that it would inspire different users to communicate with one another, it’s about taking it in turns but with everyone engaging with each other and activating dead spaces which skateboarding naturally does. 

The general public will hopefully see it and think ‘That's interesting!’ but looking at the shape, the material and use, I think to the untrained eye it doesn’t look like a skateable object but that's its ‘main’ use. 

That's great to hear! Without knowing the full extent of the project it can to a skateboarder just be ‘Southampton got a standard bench which is skateable’. How did the 3D printed bench work out?

We actually have four of them! The whole thing has become an experiment of sorts because of the way they have these jagged feet. The process of making them means that they are printed on their side which creates these ribbed textured surfaces, it almost gets built up like an ice cream. Then it's just tilted to fit the area. 

We had issues when they arrived, the first one dropped slightly on the floor and it shattered and another one was mishandled on the ferry so we made four and had two. In the end we got two more shipped over to make back the numbers. When it came to using the obstacle we had to experiment with how they would grind. Should we leave it raw and make it impossible to skate? Could we try metal coping? We had some with a long platform and bond it together to keep the surface looking clean, which is working quite well. One bench had a smaller 50mm metal edge which got hammered on Go Skateboarding Day too. We’ve attempted to sand the edges, lacquer and use boat paint. That in itself is labour-intensive and a second process which doesn’t look as clean. Even moving the benches became an experiment as the biggest one is in two pieces now, we had to find a wider pallet truck which and ,in the process we forget about how the weight and structure of the objects would affect functionality, as the lifting at specific points over multiple times affects the integrity of the bench . Time has definitely been against us. 

To go back to your previous question, the terminology of ‘temporary’ is something we’ve learned. You can create these obstacles from permanent materials. So, you can say to the local council “these are temporary and can be moved” which is something they can accept so even in x amount of years it literally could be moved away. But if you use the terminology surrounding ‘permanent’ it throws people down certain negative mindsets, the sameway acronyms or buzz-words can, you have to learn to speak a different language with people in positions of power.

Are there any other words you’ve learned to avoid or use?

Words to use are definitely ‘temporary’ and ‘inclusive’. We’ve also learned there are certain keywords that cities may be thinking about where councils are working on specific themes such as ‘reducing childhood obesity’ so we can connect with them through skateboarding and healthy living. They hear that sort of thing which is a target they are supposed to meet and they don’t need to hear about anything else. 

We’ve pitched the obstacle to stay out until October 2023 but when that time comes around you can ask “Do they need to go?”, if they do fair enough but we’re sure they could just stay. It’s all baby steps.

If they were to move, do you have a plan b lined out?

Yeah, so this is a cool thing. There’s a skatepark in the centre of town which is part of a re-development programme and they are waiting to see how it goes. The parks team is so small and they haven’t got any money but the plan is we can take these obstacles and place them into the older skateparks and in turn they’ll bring attention to the work that needs to be done. It's not a massive intervention or anything but it means they’ll continually get used and not get thrown away. Unlike any of the wooden temporary stuff which has ended up in my front garden in pieces haha. 

The council have been kind enough to store the new pieces in their own yard, which wouldn’t have really happened before but with the cultural events happening our relationship with them has gotten stronger. 

What about all the previously broken or unused skateable objects from previous events, will they just go to waste?

We’ve got all of them, they are either situated in my garden or my friend's farm haha. The plan is hopefully to work with Canvas and have them recycle what we have to create new obstacles. 

Have you had any particular councillors or park workers that champion your work?

It's so weird, those worlds whether its local councils or the government. The word ‘council’ does have these elected members but there’s all these other people who work 9-5 for them across multiple departments with years and years of experience. We found that making friends with different people was a good path, we were lucky that the person who’s idea to make a skateboarding festival was a labour councillor Satvir Kaur who was in charge of cultural outreach. That really helped us out because supporting some form of skateboarding was the council’s idea. We just ran with it and she sat on the panels fighting our corner during applications. I believe she’s now the leader of the Labour council here and her early intervention from a political standpoint has really helped us. Since skateboarding falls under the ‘culture’ banner it can’t really be touched at the moment as the local councillors decided that culture wasn't to be political, everybody has come round to the idea that skateboarding is a part of that. 

The staff members' side of things has been great, the local events teams who run the Guildhall space have reached out to the other departments on our behalf and the parks team has also been good because obviously they look after the parks. It's all down to communication. 

How do you deal with insurance and skateboarding, that must be difficult to traverse with local councils? 

It can be a massive grey area, especially when we’re talking about ‘temporary’ objects. The SkateboardGB insurance through their membership has really helped us with that, it has enabled us to insure events and as the sculptures are an event in themselves they are covered across multiple events over the course of their life cycle. We just have to share our SkateboardGB insurance to the council and events team which is super easy. Should we attempt to put them somewhere else we’d have to spend time on what is insured, the art, the skater or is it just a regular bench? That again is a massive ongoing conversation.

Have you had feedback from the core skate community? Is the scene stoked on the new additions to the city?

I’m pretty sure they are, funnily enough I don’t even get to skate in the centre of town that often and I can't jump haha. The feedback is great, but that's just me watching people skate them on social media. I don’t think it can be judged in any specific way. If there were any major issues we would've been told to move them out by now and that hasn't been the case. People are just genuinely grateful to have anything to skate other than flatground.

The texture is a bit weird, so there is that ‘This is difficult to skate.’ but skateboarders figure that bit out, we currently have three in the square and a fourth in a local park. The local park one looks more like a sunlounger, which you can Wallie onto and is more creative, it comes down to the skaters figuring it out for themselves.

Is the Guildhall somewhat of a classic old spot with an established skateboarding history?

It's wholly new. The only history of skateboarding in that area was a skate shop that would have sat right by it; that building was knocked down during the development; it was a completely un-skateable area before. It was a bad plaza. As they flattened out the area skaters flocked there before anything got built up so they felt some kind of ownership to it, it is a huge space, it dries super quick and it is completely smooth. You’ll find that the generation of skaters from Southampton now have huge pop and a crazy bag of flatground tricks because there’s pretty much nothing to skate other than the guildhall flatground. 

There’s probably going to be a generation of skaters who will never learn to drop-in because the closest skatepark is metal, prefabricated and just heavy on the transition side of skating. It's more of a fry of an egg in the heat kind of thing than a skatepark.

What are the lessons you’ve learned so far with Skate Southampton?

Probably the process. It's gone quite well, it's taken  a while. You learn to become persistent and friendly with people who are ultimately going to say yes or no. Its learning to explain  why you are trying to achieve it and ultimately at the end of the day if you work with someone who hates skateboarders and is dissatisfied it's probably going to be a struggle, but its learning to understand why they think that way, listening to their point of view and presenting the value of something that just might not understand yet. 

Logistically it’s been an experiment and we’ve learned alot about materials. Working with Rich has added another angle, his history as an international designer has obviously made things easier for us. We’ve learned alot from others such as Chris at Skate Nottingham who does amazing work and the people behind F51 in Folkestone. What we’re all doing is nothing new, it’s just new here. Just imagine trying to explain the Copenhagen Open to people. 

Skateboarding is what you make it, if we can do some cool stuff and take the opportunity while it's there to take, do it. Skateboarding is still going to exist and thrive in its own capacity. Hopefully we can just make it better in our own way.