Favorite Spot with Dom Henry on Fairfield Halls

🔑 Intro, Interview & Edit by Farran Golding
📷 Headline Photo by Wig Worland
🐐 Special Introduction by Paul Shier

Until now, the Favorite Spot series has consulted with those whose prolific outputs have positioned them as the de-facto skateboarders for spots. Our second U.K. edition is the first to somewhat stray from that formula.

After moving to London in 2017, Dom Henry began skating Croydon’s Fairfield Halls — carrying a reverence for Paul Shier’s earlier footage that had stuck with him ever since watching Blueprint’s Waiting For The World as a teenager.

Dom insists he has no claim to Fairfield and that the spot belongs to Shier and the Croydon scene who first localized it. However, in traversing a minefield of cracked flags and taking his breakneck tech to those chewed ledges almost two decades later, Dom’s enthusiasm for Fairfield would give the place a fitting send off and innocently position him as a key part of its folklore.

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Skating a Ghost Spot — Dom Henry’s ‘Farewell to Fairfield’ Part

📷 Photo by Reece Leung

We have talked about how a first arrival to a famous, foreign spot is often met with a bit of disappointment regarding the reality of said spot. It’ll be cuttier, more worn down, or gnarlier than you initially expected. Do a bit of skate travel, and you’ll learn to manage expectations for your bucket list spots.

But what about a spot you know is going to be fucked? Like, the footage already conveys how cutty, worn down, and gnarly it’ll be. No way you’ll be shocked, right?

Ok, well, what if it’s worse than you even prepared for?

That was our experience in 2014, on our sole venture out to Croydon — an outer borough of London known for being the birthplace of Kate Moss and having a very large Ikea — to skate the Fairfield Halls spot made famous by Paul Shier, Nick Jensen, et al. It is U.K. spot royalty, recognizable from every Blueprint video, to Jacob Harris’ earlier projects, and right through Palasonic.

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