Young people help to design youth centre skatepark

Young people in Staple Hill will have a new space to skateboard, rollerblade and scoot once an indoor skatepark suitable for beginners opens in April.

The project is being run by youth workers from The YOU Foundation, and will be based in the former Staple Hill Infants School on Page Road. The team hopes to meet demand from local young people, many of whom have taken up skating during the Covid-19 pandemic.

“It’s the perfect hobby in lockdown,” says Rob Sharp, youth work manager at The YOU Foundation. “You can do it by yourself, and you don’t have to do it at a skatepark.”

Rob has been skating for ten years. In the early stages of lockdown, he says it was almost impossible to get hold of equipment including skateboards, because of the activity’s newfound popularity. One study estimates that 70,000 have started skating since the start of the pandemic.

The nearest ramps are just over a mile away, in Kingswood’s Southy Park, while the much larger St George skatepark is three miles away. Young people were going to the parks, but they were telling Rob that the experience was “a bit intimidating”. With high ramps and big jumps, Rob says: “The council’s skateparks are only useful if you’re really good.

“We wanted to make somewhere to go that’s safe, not intimidating, somewhere to practice and learn. We wanted to meet that need.”

They also wanted to create an indoor space, allowing young people to train whatever the weather.

In consultation with young people, a series of modular ramps costing £4,000, which can be packed away when not in use, has been designed to fit inside the old PE hall. The YOU Foundation have been hard at work fundraising, and are now around a month away from the ramps being delivered.

A working group of young people plan to build the ramps in socially-distanced sessions at the end of March, with the skatepark opening in April.

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Seventeen-year-old Josh, who lives in Hillfields, has been helping to design the perfect set of ramps and rails. He’s been skating for two years, but learning at the skatepark in St George hasn’t been easy: “It’s difficult to get going, to know what to go on. It’s hard to find your bearings and your confidence.”

Josh thinks the indoor ramps will definitely help young people in the area who are just starting out. “If you consistently keep going you’ll get more confident,” he says. “It’s an opportunity to go somewhere closer, with less people. It’s going to bring people together.”

Once sessions are running, The YOU Foundation plans to employ skateboard coaches to give the young people pointers. Rob hopes to bring in local skateboarder and community activist Dan Lacey, who has been getting skateparks built in South Gloucestershire since he was a teenager. Dan has helped The YOU Foundation team from the beginning, and Rob describes Dan’s expertise as “instrumental”.

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It’s been an extremely challenging year for youth work services across Bristol. While The YOU Foundation’s contract with South Gloucestershire Council – to run two nights of youth provision per week – has continued throughout the pandemic, other funding streams that cover the day-to-day running costs have dried up.

“We’ve done some disaster planning,” Rob says. “It’s been a big struggle. You go through rollercoasters of ‘are you going to be ok? Are you going to have to write redundancies for staff?’ – it’s been very stressful. And frustrating too, because we’ve had times when it looked better. You gain momentum – and then it gets lost.”

In the first weeks of lockdown, the team focussed on doing welfare checks. Youth support services all moved online: connecting with young people through social media, and running contactless activities, like craft video tutorials. The team now do a lot of outreach, putting together activity packs and handing them out in local parks.

To have pulled off this ambitious skatepark project despite all the other challenges is testament to their dedication.

“The main point of a youth service is to let young people know they are valued, and that there is somewhere in society for them,” Rob says. “Young people could be feeling abandoned. Doing this has been our way to say ‘there’s still people here to support you’.”

Once the skatepark is operational, young people aged 11-19 will be able to book slots by visiting www.theyoufoundation.org. To keep track of progress, follow @theboardingschoolks8 on Instagram.

Main image of Rob Sharp supplied by The YOU Foundation

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