This year, Tim Crawley has partnered with Dr. Jim Donaghey and UKRI (UK Research and Innovation) to showcase the longstanding skate scene of Portrush, located on Ireland's north coast. Their project sheds light on a 30-year community campaign to obtain a permanent skatepark in the town, alongside efforts to archive the extensive footage of Slaine Browne - a local shop owner and lynchpin of the Portrush scene.
In Tim's film, The Skateboarding Heritage of Portrush: Collaborative Research Empowering a Grassroots Community, street skating in Portrush can be easily traced back to the global Back to the Future inspired boom of the 1980s. Despite decades of challenges in gaining proper recognition from local authorities, skateboarding has remained a vital part of the town's identity.
Slaine Browne, owner of Rawee Skateboards on Main Street, has been documenting the scene since he started skating in 1995. Reflecting on his role in the project, Slaine shared:
"I’d been filming skateboarding in Portrush since the late ‘90s. Getting into this research project, I was asked to go through my own skate footage and put that together again, 20 or 30 years after I filmed it. So basically, my job was to go through something like 215 hours of footage. It was great to go back and revisit it … it feels like yesterday when I started skating here.
Making new material for the project has opened up other pathways, with people seeing the videos and asking me to make more stuff for them. It’s been great to suddenly have a lot more confidence in what I’ve been doing since I was a kid, which is playing with video cameras.
A lot of the older ones like me, we’ve come back to the skateboarding scene in Portrush, because we saw there was a new generation coming through. In all this community stuff that we’ve been doing with the skaters, I’ve noticed that the younger ones are fully into it. They all want to know more about making videos, they want to learn how to build ramps. It’s just great seeing the reaction. You see how many people are coming down. It’s good to know that we’re all here together."
The UKRI, which funded the project through the AHRC’s Creative Communities program, is a government body supporting research and innovation across fields ranging from quantum technology to skateboarding. Frank Grimshaw, a collaborator on the project, explained why Portrush's skate scene caught their attention:
"[There's a] proper skate scene in Portrush: inclusive, cohesive, community-minded, and good too. For 30-40 years they’ve been riding gravelly, rough town roads, and still turning out some really good skateboarders.
When we were filming they told us how during the Troubles it was only skateboarders and graffiti guys who could move freely through sectarian lines (“never run”.) And how they’d skate past tanks into bombed-out buildings; a war zone, really, in the UK in our lifetimes. Mad really, and not something I’ve ever really thought about. Turns out it’s made a resilient scene and skaters who have kept at it for generations despite not really having anywhere to do it. I think in the grand scheme of things, for the good of the town, the council should just build them a skatepark."
Enjoy Tim's film below, and keep up to date with Portrush developments over on the UKRI Instagram!
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