On the boards

In my school playground, if you didn't ride on Green Cryptonics, you were no one Photograph by Robert Powell

A bit of wood with wheels, bastard child of surf board and roller skate, the skateboard is the fad that never went away. Variants and rivals for youth attention pop up every year - the more recent being the snakeboard, and the roller blade - but the skateboard thrives and has more influence on street style now than at any time in its 40-odd year history.

Forty-odd is as close as you can get, because the invention of the skateboard is lost in the mists of urban myth. Precisely who first thought up the idea is not known, but the location was the ultimate leisure factory: California.

Ben Powell, of Sidewalk Surfer, the British skateboard magazine, says it was invented by "some surfers who one day put wheels on a surfboard and took it from there. It seems right that the skateboard should have no written history, no structure. It's a street thing, always changing."

Which is why it is so difficult to describe the archetypal skateboard. The early Californian models consisted of a wooden board with little clay wheels no more than 30mm in diameter. By the time skateboarding took off in the UK in the late 1970s, the boards themselves were of wood or plastic, and the wheels were made of polyurethane, large and gaudily coloured: in my school playground, if you didn't ride on Green Cryptonics, you were no one.

After that brief flare of interest, the sport went underground, but innovation continued. "It became much more of a technical sport," according to Chris Turner of London emporium Slam City Skates. "There was a lot more street skating, using the urban jungle. People experimented with different boards, different shapes, different materials - metal, carbon fibre - and finally it became clear that the best material was wood: or, more precisely, seven- ply Canadian maple. That's what you have to have now."

Exactly what you have depends on the size of your feet, and on what sort of skateboarder you are. There are two camps: street skaters and ramp skaters. Ramp skaters live for speed, swooping down steep "pipes" at one of the seven permanent ramps in the country, or more likely on a course improvised out of wooden boards.

The street skater is an improviser, an exploiter of the urban environment, always on the look-out for a likely flight of steps up which to flip, a low wall crying out for a knee-threatening manoeuvre. The attraction is always in finding new sites, new possibilities: the moves themselves rarely change.

"There is only so much you can do on a skateboard," Turner admits. "Flips, pops, jumps. Then you learn to do them backwards, then you learn to do them switch-stance: that is, facing the opposite way, pushing off with your other foot."

Which is not to say that any of it is easy. "It takes a year, two years, to learn properly," Ben Powell reckons. "It's so difficult to get right. People think it's just like snowboarding, and it is kind of connected. But you are learning on concrete, not snow."

Skateboarders believe their sport peaks and troughs according to a regular cycle. Seven years is a popular suggestion: interest gradually climbs for three years, then there is an annus mirabilis of mass popularity, media attention and fashion influence.

1996 is such a year.

"It's big at the moment," Chris Turner says. "There is MTV coverage and the people that are benefiting are those who are now 18 to 23, the hard core who stuck with it, who spent the dark years knackering themselves. Now they are getting paid back."

So are the manufacturers - Powell, no relation to Ben, is the most popular - who plugged away through the doldrum years. New brands, such as Toy Machine and Girl, have leapt aboard the boardwagon, but truly there is little difference between the best boards - graphics are all. How much? You can be up and running for pounds 140.

Of course, you can spend more on skate shoes and related clothing, but don't expect much credibility at the ramp. "This whole shoe thing has been blown out of proportion," Turner says. "Skate shoes are now selling to chain stores. The people that are wearing them may know nothing about skateboards."

A month or so ago, the shoemakers organised a skateboard event on a dockside site adjacent to the Canary Wharf development in east London. But the skateboarders were distracted by the proximity of Canary Wharf, with its tantalising walkways, kerbs and flights of steps, and, frustratingly, with its lurking, skateboard-hating security guards. Skateboarders can dream, which is more than can be said for most of the number crunchers who daily put the pavements there to orthodox use. As Turner puts it: "You might have a degree in accountancy or something, but can you kick- flip seven steps?"