I’d be stoked too If I lived in a city with a good skate park. Oh wait, I do. Anyway, The City of Stoke On Trent (True!) in England is coming up on the first anniversary of their skate park called, what else, but Stoke Plaza? It looks pretty damn good (from the Internet at least.) I’m not much for today’s street parks, but this one has plenty of banks and an interesting layout that looks fun. Topping it off is an outlying system of skate paths, an interesting concept that appears to be gathering momentum among builders and advocates. These pictures are from the UK Sketchy Skateboarding website.
If you think I’ve gotten obsessive compulsive about skatepark construction photos, Sketchy Skateboarding takes the cake in that department. There are construction photos of both the big park and the skate path section. It’s not all street either. There’s even a good sized bowl.
The weather in these photos reminds me that I live in Oregon and those clouds are about to head my way. Check out the skate path. It’s sort of along the lines of Portland’s skate spots idea. Maybe not exactly, but a similar idea is planned for the entrance path to the new Pier Park.
Check out sketchyskateboarding.co.uk and tell ’em we sent you.
8 comments
ferris
quitters never win
Kilwag (k.ed)
Yeah.. what’s fun about that? I quit.
ferris
i dont need to read the post to know that its dumb. skateboarding is dumb as a whole, what is so fun about falling on your ass all day and then jacking off when you get home
Kilwag (k.ed)
Cause just saying “yall are dumb and I’m glad you hate your parents” is dumb, and worse yet. Boring. It’s like you didn’t even read the post.
ferris
why are my comments deleted
Kilwag (k.ed)
I checked out Prissick Plaza (on the web). There’s no good overview shot of the whole park, so it’s hard to get a sense of what it looks like. Otherwise it looks kind of generic. Their web monkey needs to get on that. It seems like there are more than a few skateparks in the UK with official web sites run by the city or some agency. Strange phenomenon.
Matt Sefton
I’ve skated Stoke Plaza a couple of times. It’s a really nice park but the photos do it a bit more justice than it deserves, in my opinion. It’s 99% street focussed (nothing wrong with that but it’s not my bag!) and the bowl is extremely difficult to ride as it’s very tight and the waterfall from the shallow into the deep is steep, meaning that it’s difficult to work the bowl well unless you ride it all the time. The whole place is well made but the skate paths are a little spoilt by steps just where you don’t expect them to be when you’re piling down the paths at speed on your longboard! Having said all that, it’s great to see parks like that springing up over here and my opinion is probably coloured by the fact that every time I’ve been to Stoke it has either been raining or a couple of degrees below freezing!
Prissick Plaza in Middlesbrough (about a 50 minute drive from me) is way better than Stoke imho and features a copy of the Encinitas bowl (left hand kidney, 6ft shallow, 13ft deep) and a massive street plaza with recreations of spots including Love Park stairs, MACBA gap, and Pier 7. Find out more at http://www.prissickplaza.co.uk.
egbert
holy shit, that looks fun.