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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Units in the City

Summer 2020 QS stuff should be available at most, if not all, U.S. accounts now. Still arriving in Canada + Australia. Japan + Korea been had it. Arriving in Europe early June. Thank you to everyone who grabbed something from the webstore. We’ll be shipping all week, and yes, you will get a shipping confirmation + tracking when your order goes out. There’s still a good bit on there, though a lot of the tees are down to smalls and mediums. So funny how 3-4 years ago, it was XLs that were leftover, but now everyone seems to have sized up. Spread via Orchard.

The city is just installing randomass street hips for us to have fun on now?

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Five Favorite Parts With Dom Henry

Intro by Farran Golding
Still from Cottonopolis by Sean Lomax

My introduction to Dom Henry’s skating was through a Live Skateboard Media part in 2015, but to the uninitiated, his parts in Cottonopolis, Afterbang and NEXT are all good places to start.

Dom’s technicality stems from a youth spent learning to skate in Reading, England, where there were car parks and not much else. After moving to Manchester later in life, Dom’s ledge abilities thrived on the black marble of Urbis plaza (Northern England’s answer to Love Park.) He possesses the ability to make intricate skateboarding exude a “less is more” quality due to his unmistakable shapes and flick. Graceful, stretched out and sharp — it’s one of those nuances to which description won’t do justice. Here are five sections that inspired him along the way.

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94 And What

“But as long as your board is selling, no one has any problem with short video parts.” — Rest in Peace, Gabriel Rodriguez. Some of the most iconic arm steez in the history of skateboarding (not sure if anyone threw them ‘bows quite as stylishly as Gabriel did on a rollaway.)

Sign + share the petition to keep synthetic turf off the Tompkins flat.

Antosh‘s “Elbow Room” edit for a new board brand called Deed is really, really fucking good. Never would have thought a nose manual on pretty much the entire length of the main bank at Verizon would’ve been do-able, and that ender at Big Screen is nuts. Features solid appearances from all the Canadian sweethearts you know and love.

Don’t think there has ever been a skate interview that just got right into it quite the way Fred Gall’s Chromeball one did. Really wish the best for Fred, and skateboarding is lucky to have such an honest, open person in its ranks of legends. The Governor of New Jersey.

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The Week In Noseslides

When we are entrenched in a moment — a space where the skateboard media machine feels entirely focused on one full-length, one seminal part, one finicky faux pas — it feels like Nyjah Huston is just frozen in time, midway down a quadruple kink rail, just waiting for our conversation about Gustav’s foot placement to quiet down before he can resume grinding down the remaining nine kinks.

We are long past the days of skateboarding’s progression standing still until the next VHS tape comes out. Time waits for no man — and a bunch of Swedes holed up in Barcelona listening to MF Doom are no exception.

Noseslides, The Building Block of Modern Skateboarding™, don’t pause for anyone either. Though we were all up in arms about the mirror pretzel line, Nisse’s noseslide pop-over the rail was Sour Solution II‘s peak plain-old-noseslide execution. Beyond that, the video set its sights well beyond the Forbidden 14.

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