00:00My name is Kenny Brophy, I'm a Senior Lecturer in Archaeology at the University of Glasgow.
00:04We're standing in the Kelvin Wheelies Skateboard Park, which is also known as the KG,
00:09in the middle of Kelvin Grove Park and it was a really important concrete skate park that was
00:16open in the late 70s and closed in the 1980s and we're here this week because we've been carrying
00:21out archaeological excavations and survey work here so we're just checking out aspects of the
00:26surviving remains of the concrete park to see what survives and see if we can say anything more
00:30about the modern story of this place through archaeological methods. So the skate park was
00:35opened in 1978 by Glasgow Council and it was a proper council facility, it had a fence around it,
00:42there was a freestyle area, there was a lot of really quite dramatic concrete ramps and bowls
00:47and jumps and it had a burger stand, a ticket office, a first aid tent and all that kind of stuff so it
00:52was a proper staff facility and that ceased in about 1982 due to a lack of funding and because
00:58there was problems with drainage and stuff so in 1982 they took the fences down and shut down the
01:02kind of the paid element. After that the council got concerned that the BMX riders and skateboarders were
01:08going to hurt themselves within the kind of the unregulated environment of the skate park so they
01:12took the decision to fill the whole thing in so the whole thing was basically buried and landscaped to
01:17be a kind of more of a garden feature within the skate park so all that's left visible on the ground
01:21just now are some of the concrete rims of the bigger features and some fences and other than
01:26that you wouldn't really know what had been here. We're lucky because it's quite a recent
01:29site in the last 50 years that we've got people we can speak to who were children or teenagers who
01:34skated here and some of those have been helping on the excavation. We've had both those people and
01:39also a lot of members of the public have been sending us photographs and archive material related
01:45to the skate park so we know exactly what it looked like because of all the photos and we have the
01:50stories and memories of the people who played here as well and they've been on the excavation helping
01:55us out so a lot of the gaps are being filled in but there's still things that we didn't really know
01:59exactly no one was quite sure when it was filled in how it was filled in and some of the aspects of
02:04what happened here at the end of the life of the park and so that's something that we've been able
02:07to unpick through the archaeology and we've also been able to find other bits of the park that were
02:11never properly recorded like graffiti on the sides of some of the concrete features so the archaeology
02:16is recording stuff that was really never recorded even 40 odd years ago as far as i can tell it was
02:21a really high quality place it was designed by someone who designed some of the top skate parks in
02:26london it had they brought in californian skateboarders to test skateboarders to test it out
02:32before it was actually open to the public and they made some recommendations to make it safer because it
02:36was initially too dangerous so there was a lot of kind of thought went into making it a proper
02:41international quality concrete skate park that was one that was the skateboarders came from all
02:46around the world to have a go at so it was it was used for the uk championships so it was a really
02:51top quality facility and the council pumped a lot of money into this it cost about 100 000 pounds
02:56to build it in the first place so that was a massive investment in what was basically a marginal
03:00teenage sport at the time so the council were clearly keen to provide a facility for young people
03:05and also to try and put glasgow on the skateboarding map yeah there's some amazing skaters yeah i mean i've
03:09spoken to a lot of the um the guys who were teenagers and they were winning uk championships
03:14or performing at a really high level and there was a they were kind of looking up to the generation
03:18before so it was it was a time when skating really took off in scotland for about five years it was
03:23super popular and again it started to decline in the early 80s because of bmx riding it became more
03:29popular and also they opened the livy which is a skate park in livingston which is still um used today
03:34and it was and it was probably even better than this one and that took some of the attention as well
03:38so for a while glasgow is like the capital of skateboarding in scotland the team we've got
03:42digging on here on site are a real mixture so we've got volunteer students who are in the archaeology
03:49department at glasgow university they're here learning their trade so some are on their first
03:52excavation and they're doing a lot of the digging and recording we've also been working with
03:56skateboarders both young and old so guys who have come along who are 14 back in 1978 and skated here
04:02they've come back and they've been helping us excavate and also we'll get next generations of
04:06skateboarders here as well because this is a bit of a legendary skate park for the younger skateboarders
04:10and it's next to the the modern skate park and we've also been working with archaeology scotland
04:15em who have paired up with the scottish refugee council so earlier in the week we had em some
04:19refugees on site who are doing volunteer work and picking up new skills and they've been doing a lot
04:23of the work as well so it's been a real melting pot through the week which i think is really in the
04:27spirit of skateboarding i think that i would quite like to em raise the profile of the skate park because
04:32it's here and a really popular important park in glasgow but there's actually not much knowledge
04:36about it by most people so it'd be good that em people knew what this was rather than just trying
04:41to make sense of a bunch of concrete and metal railings it'd be good if maybe some aspects that
04:45were presented better to the public and maybe also folk could find out more so hopefully there'll be
04:50some information at the skate park in the future where you can see different bits that em make it make
04:55more sense of them than you can just now and then go online and look at a digital archive that will have
04:59photographs and video footage of the skate park when it was in use and so the the real the real
05:04positive outcome would be if this doesn't become a forgotten part of glasgow's modern heritage because
05:09there's a danger if nothing was done here in 20 30 years time no one would remember anything about
05:13this it would be completely buried and overgrown and it'll be forgotten so hopefully that's not going
05:18to happen anymore the excavations are going to run until tomorrow so the end of the end of august basically
05:23and then after that we'll maybe do some more survey work in the next few months
05:26uh working we're going to build a digital archive and put that online in the next six months as
05:30well working with skateboarders and if anyone wants to get in touch then you can google me kenny brofey
05:36and you'll find my contact details on the university webpage or you can use social media and use the hashtag
05:41kelvin wheelies and we'll pick up any information or stories or memories that you want to share with us so
05:46we're really happy for anyone to share photos memories or video so that we can tell more of the story of the skate park
05:52these are pictures that were taken by jamie blair and ian urquhart em back in the late 70s early 80s
05:57which show aspects of the skate park when it was in use so it gives you a real sense of how massive the
06:04features were these balls were you know eight ten feet deep em you can see these ones with all the
06:09graffiti on it so these are the ones that they would go down slalom runs at speed to then do takeoffs and
06:14jumps so they were able to do this kind of thing so this is jamie blair here when he was 14 em doing a hand
06:22plant and with his skateboard so they would go down and then he'll be able to flip over and do
06:26that and one of the things that we've been looking for is a another skateboarder told us that he
06:31painted a hand print on this part of the concrete rim so that every time he came around the corner
06:37then he was able to know exactly where to put his hand to perform this maneuver so they were actually
06:41doing some really kind of quite elaborate stunts even at a young age so it was it was a really hardcore
06:46skate park so the photographs that we have from the time give a real sense of it just being a really
06:52amazing facility you can see that with kelvin grove in the background and this it's nice and
06:56planted it looks all pristine a really fantastic resource so it was somewhere that was really
07:02special to kids at the time and that's kind of captured by all these amazing photographs you know
07:06this is a half pipe where the uk championships was focused in 1979 this was completely bulldozed in 1983
07:13by the council and buried so none of that survives at all now so there's a real mixture of what's left and
07:18what's not but this is a really invaluable record and it helps us to make sense of the archaeology
07:23to be able to look at these photographs and actually work out where we are on the site
07:26and give us targets to look for so it's a perfect combination of digging into things but also having
07:31archive and interviewing and talking to people to make sense of what we're trying to find
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