Favorite Spot with Stu Kirst on the Grey Wall

🔑 Interview, Intro & Edit by Farran Golding
📹 Footage courtesy of Johnny Wilson
📷 Photography by Paul Coots

Water Street and its peripheries in New York’s financial district, offer a handful of conventionally “good” skateboarding destinations. Head towards Battery Park and you may see someone giving security the slip at C-Benches or a visiting pro on a pilgrimage at Pyramid Ledges. However, between 2015 to 2020, one might have have found Stu Kirst atop a skinny, eight-feet high platform, sizing up a route obliquely hidden in plain sight.

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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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Favorite Spot With Lucien Clarke on Victoria Benches

Although good ledge spots are hardly synonymous with British skateboarding, it’s a surprising reality that they were missing from even the country’s capital until the turn of the millennium. Such was the landscape of London until, in the late 1990s, heaven was discovered in an unassuming patch of greenery just down the road from Victoria Station. Jacob Sawyer’s wonderful “Ode To Victoria Benches” story for Slam City Skates pinpoints the spot as having been discovered somewhere around 1997. The Blueprint Skateboards team and friends would go on to localize it, with the benches appearing in Waiting For The World, Headcleaner, and First Broadcast.

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Favorite Spot With Cyrus Bennett on The Sombrero

Photo by Colin Sussingham 📷

“If you’re not doing shit and you strike out a couple of times, you can just go there and punish yourself.”

After a long hiatus for the “Favorite Spot” series, Farran has brought it back with the second most-requested episode after the Max one. (Which now, makes it the most-requested episode?)

In a city as dense with spots as this one, it’s really something for a spot to feel isolated from the rest of skateboarding, and this one certainly fits the bill — as anyone who has been stuck here watching a friend try a trick can attest. Cyrus Bennett was kind enough to share his history with this innocuous corner of Maspeth on the side of a highway, between two cemeteries.

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Favorite Spot With Andrew Allen on L.A. High

Photo by Andrew James Peters

So far, the “Favorite Spot” series has centered around main plazas in smaller city scenes, particular nooks in larger cities that particular skaters have an affinity for, and of course, recognizable pieces of skate ephemera now covered on real estate publications.

Farran’s latest is about one of the most storied spots in the capital of the skateboard world, recognizable to anybody who has seen a skateboard video these past thirty years. It’s no surprise that this installment ended up being the longest one ;)

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