Masses of people fill the streets, the concrete is fucked up, double decker busses whiz by, pushy cab drivers cut you off…

The first time I came to London was on a bus from Rotterdam, the Netherlands and I have always remembered how the bus weaved and turned through the endless towns, suburbs and mini city centers that encompass the greater London area as we only arrived at the outskirts of the main city, we still needed another hour and a half to eventually reach Victoria Station. Vast and expansive, London impresses one, not by the usual urban attribute of concentration, but by the shear magnitude of it’s breadth.

Of the many ways to move around the city, skateboarding definitely has to be one of the more dangerous and particularly difficult, perhaps even more particular for me, considering that my traffical orientation is of the reverse kind and that skateboarding by nature is reactionary. Masses of people fill the streets, the concrete is fucked up, double decker busses whiz by, pushy cab drivers cut you off, lost tourists and drunk locals have no logic in their movements. The English metropolis is a hazardous place. But even with all this danger, it would seem that skating would be an appreciated mode of transport in this environment full of bad air quality. This didn’t seem to be the case, according to the police officer that stopped me and told me that it was illegal to skateboard in the streets. When I asked him if it was alright to skate on the bike paths, he got confused and told me to only skate on the bike paths on the other side of the river. I wasn’t quite sure what he meant, since I was a bit disoriented and didn’t know where the river was at that point anyway, and as far as I know, the river has a few big bends in it. But either way, I wasn’t trying to push the issue, so I walked a block out of sight, jumped back on the board and kept on rollin’.