City Mill Pool Street

City Mill Skate opens a series of skateable obstacles as part of the UCLE development on Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park, London. The architectural interventions are described as ‘skate dots’ by project leads Sam Griffin and Dr Esther Sayers.

City Mill Skate is a project commissioned by UCL East Public Art Programme. With direction from Sam Wilkinson, UCL Public Art and insight from Professor Iain Borden, UCL Bartlett School of Architecture, City Mill Skate is led by Dr Esther Sayers, Goldsmiths College, creative activist, mum and skateboarder with artist Sam Griffin, a graduate of the UCL Slade School of Fine Art, a long-time skater, activist, skatespot builder and curator. Both Sayers and Griffin are local East London residents and have strong connections with the communities in and around UCL East.

Historically, University College London has been based at their Gower Street campus. This area has a rich history within London skate culture and is home to several well-known skate spots, including the raised plaza within the UCL campus at Torrington Square, the SOAS campus on Thornhaugh Street, and also John Watkins Plaza and Lincoln Square (off Carey Street) within the nearby LSE campus.

City Mill Skate is part of a wider set of initiatives across UCL that are looking at ways to open universities up to a more diverse audience and to encourage a broader spectrum of potential students into the new campus. With the aim of challenging existing ideas about what life at university can be like.

The negotiations of the design and then use of this space provide an interesting test case of the agency of skateboarders in discussions of how people can use privately owned public space, as well as the role of a university as a public body engaging the local community. Using our community-led, participatory process we provide an opportunity for local skateboarders to be key stakeholders in this design and subsequent use of this space as well as informing how we can use and transfer our research methods to other sites and skateboard communities.

City Mill Skate has engaged with a broad cross-section of the skate community: male and female skateboarders, all ages from 8-65 years old, adaptive skateboarders, a range of ethnicities and including those who have not been to university. The City Mill Skate programme is grounded in over two years of field work gathering the viewpoints and ideas of a broad range of user groups, all of whom are local to the Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park.

Central to our programme is also the need to invert normal models of skatepark construction, by instead placing our participants and their ideas at the very heart of any final constructed architecture, to ensure that final outcomes preserve as much fidelity as possible to the needs of the local user groups we have engaged in our programme.

Our project has been running for four years now, during which we have overseen a program of community engagement with a wide range of potential user groups from across East London, whose ideas for skate dots and associated user considerations now form the backbone of the current plans for the site. Our research has also shown that the landscape of the skateboarding and wheeled sports community is now actually more diverse than ever, with participation by female skaters, non-binary skaters and adaptive skaters at unprecedented levels.