Feature: Jaunt to Jersey

Interview & photography: Henry Genualdo Kingsford.

Back in September, we joined members of the UK Vans team for a long weekend on the island of Jersey to attend the inaugural Bowl Ā Crock event at the excellent new Les Quennevais Skatepark, located on the west of the island. The event itself, held on the Saturday, was a great success: well-attended by any standard, but all the more impressive on an island with population of just 100,000, with skaters of all ages and abilities skating together during the bowl and street jams. Around the event, and with local legend and old friend Luka Pinto as our guide, we managed to fit in some productive street missions, sampling a wide variety of challenging-yet-rewarding spots, from bunkers and sea walls on the west coast to some of the narrow, transitioned walls the island is known for.

We’d like to say a big thank you to Bowl Ā Crock organisers Natalie Mayer, Mark and Zannah Le Moignan, Chris Scott, Phil Minty, James Goode, Mark Richardson and Scott Nixon for all their work putting on such a special event, and to Vans for the invite. 

For some more insight into Bowl Ā Crock and the motivations behind it, Jersey’s Skate Space project, as well as some observations about skateboarding on the island from the perspective of a mother of a young skater, we caught up for a chat with photographer and champion of Jersey skateboarding, Natalie Mayer.

Am I right in thinking you have a background in snowboard photography? 
Yes. Through the 2000s, I shot snowboarding for magazines and brands in the UK and Europe. This was an amazing time in snowboarding’s evolution – it still had the grungy, DIY feeling that came through the ’90s, but had been discovered by the mainstream as the ‘new thing’, so there was budget within the brands to send a bunch of kids around the world to jump off roofs, session snowy street rails and come back with the film and footage. 

How did you become involved in working with skateboarders on the island?
I guess, from my past, I had some ideas about good things that could be happening, and so I started to work hard on finding ways to get this into action.  

Do you shoot skateboarding?
My secret skill was discovered on the Malmö trip, but in general I leave the skaters to get on with it. My role now is more as a kind of fixer / shadow player for helping Jersey skateboarding reach its potential. 

How is public perception of skateboarding in Jersey and has this changed since the new park was built?
I’d say Jersey is in its glory days of skateboarding right now. We ran a solid guerrilla positivity campaign in the run-up to them deciding on the new park. Tony Hawk, via his right hand man Seth (Venezia), and Ed Leigh and Jenny Jones (BBC celebrities) did us some amazing little broadcasts, from Birdhouse and the Olympic arena to the Government of Jersey, banging on about the positive elements of skateboarding. These seemed to capture the public imagination, went properly viral on the island because it was so direct, and helped the sport go from this idea in people’s minds that it’s only for naughty kids in back alleys, to it being a legitimate and positive pastime that we really ought to support if we want our kids to turn out well. I genuinely think Jersey didn’t realise it was building one of the biggest skateparks in the UK, but the fact that it did, and that it’s now getting so well used, has been really positive for everyone. 

What do you think makes skateboarding a positive pastime for young people in Jersey? Your son skates, so I guess you have first-hand experience.
Most riders I shot snowboarding had come through skateboarding in some way, so it was always part of life and travel. I always had a huge respect for the sport, even more that snowboarding in a way – it’s accessibility and lack of faff, not to mention the way it provided the foundation for good style in all the other board sports. And of course, it now being 20 years after it came into my life, I’ve seen first-hand how it provides a kind of anchor to keep friendships alive. The fact that my son got into it – in a big way – was amazing for me; he’s been able to hang with my old friends and interact on their level, and there is a kind of mutual respect that might be more difficult to find between two generations, were it not for this link. So clearly I could see all the good sides, and being a fully-fledged adult, I wanted to ‘give back’ to Jersey kids and do what I could to nurture something that has been a huge and positive influence through my life. 

The island has been quite influential in the world of skateboarding, especially considering the number of inhabitants. People like Luka Pinto and Glen Fox are well known for their unique takes on street skating. Why do you think the island has bred such creative skateboarders?
Well, I don’t know the answer to this first-hand, but I know people say that because the Jersey street skating terrain is so small and shit, they’ve had to develop quick feet and creative minds to adapt. That made perfect sense to me. 

Tell us about Skate Space.
Via some luck, some nice old men offered me the chance to put an indoor skatepark in a cavernous, disused church. This is still a work in progress – Jersey bureaucracy is notorious – but I’m determined because once the hurdles are overcome, we’ll have something epic. So first and foremost, Skate Space is that project. Skate Space is also a charity which is a vehicle for encouraging all the positive, creative elements of skateboarding. Thanks to our sponsor Sure, we will have an edit suite at the church, with some high-spec iMacs, the idea being to make editing accessible to kids who can’t necessarily afford the equipment. We’d like to bring respectable filmmakers over from the world of skateboarding and they can go on missions with our local kids, gather footage, edit and produce inspiring work. Obviously this is stuff that happens anyway, and is the backbone of skateboarding, but if we can bring outside influence to the island, we have the chance to up-level our local scene and hopefully give our kids a platform.

Luka told me about a trip you organised to Malmö, where he filmed from a wheelchair with a broken ankle, and the crew visited the Bryggeriet skate school. Tell us more about this trip.
(Laughs), there were many funny things about this trip. It was a random idea that worked out really well. I knew of a fund, which helps people who can’t otherwise afford it, to access art and cultural experiences anywhere in the world. I felt skateboarding fit this, and that I could find the language to explain this to a panel who knew very little about the sport. We could have gone anywhere, but Malmö, with Bryggeriet, Pushing Boarders and its generally progressive attitude, seemed easily translatable to the panel. 

At this time, I didn’t personally know many local skaters of the new generation, so I told my lad Fred, who was 14 at the time, to gather his ultimate list of creative street skaters and invite them on an all-expenses-paid trip to Malmö. That was fun, and kind of nerve wracking for him! We had a team of 10, aged between 14 and 30. It was a weird and funny hybrid between a family holiday and a legit skate trip. I knew the skaters had no idea what would be expected of them and I think they were pleasantly relieved when they realised the only brief was to go skate and have fun. I had no expectation to be invited on the street missions to shoot photos – no one knew me as a photographer, I’m just Fred’s weird mum with a strange interest in skateboarding. When they realised I was handy with a camera too, things gelled really well. We hung out, shot photos and filmed, and generally had a full and fun cultural experience in an awesome city. 

Tell us about Bowl Ā Crock.
The idea behind Bowl Ā Crock is literally to stoke everyone out, make something really fun and positive, and also create something where Skate Space could facilitate young skaters to max out on their creative potential. We paid skateboarders to design (Danny Franco smashed this) and paint up the park (Tom Piercy), and I sorted out the funding so that we could invite a load of pros to come and session the park with the locals. We also had live bands, DJs, food, graffiti, WCMX, and generally all the stuff that makes the skatepark alive and pumping.

Tell about the name.
Bowl Ā Crock is a collision of Bowlarama, a Crock of Shit, and Bean Crock, a traditional Jersey bean stew that we all love to eat. 

Who sponsored the event?
Government of Jersey and Sure Mobile funded the event, we were hydrated by Liquid Death and Vans and Volcom provided prizes for the jams and picked riders for us to bring over. It sort of snowballed from there and other skaters started getting in touch and asking if we could help them come, so I just did what I could to facilitate that, knowing that the more connections we could make, the better it would be for everyone.

How did the event go, from your perspective?
Everyone said they had loads of fun, and that was the aim. I think next time, we’d probably try and clear the terrain a bit more so that half the island isn’t trying to use the park at once, but overall, we wanted locals and visitors to have some good sessions and enjoy the island, and from that perspective I reckon the event nailed it. I heard some good street sessions went down too, so I’m really looking forward to seeing some content from that. 

Aside from the planned indoor facility, what are your hopes and plans for the future of skateboarding on the island? Will Bowl Ā Crock be an ongoing, annual event?
We’ll do Bowl Ā Crock again for sure, hopefully even a little bigger next year. And in general for skateboarding, well, we just want to see Jersey maxing out on all it’s amazing potential both creatively and sport-wise, so hopefully the little things I’ve been able to facilitate will spark new ideas and motivations, and will kind of promote the idea that we can all do stuff for each other, which will ultimately have a massive positive effect on the whole skate scene, and life in Jersey in general. 

You can watch Nick Richards’ video documenting our time in Jersey here.