City Mill Skate

“City Mill Skate is a research project that uses a shared design process to build a proposal for the construction of permanent skateable objects within the new University College London campus, known as UCL East”

Beginning in 2019, City Mill Skate (Dr Esther Sayers and Sam Griffin) conducted a research project with various groups of local skaters and riders. The groups were specifically targeted in order to gain an understanding of how different people interact with a skate-able space, in particular those whose voices are rarely heard. The goal of the research was to eventually co-design series of “skate dots” to be built at the new UCL campus.  “Skate Dots” is a term coined by the researchers at City Mill Skate to describe, well, just about anything that could be skate-able. 

Throughout 2020 and 2021 a programme of skate lessons and design and making workshops were carried out. The first round of in-person making workshops were scuppered at the last minute by Covid restrictions, but quickly and nimbly City Mill Skate devised a plan to send out some 70+ model making kits for users to participate from the safety of their own home. The online model-making workshops provided a much-needed lifeline for the many people left isolated and disconnected from their community.

As restrictions eased the program of participation continued, and eventually a handful of dots were earmarked for real life construction and evaluation. The resulting City Mill Skate site at Pool Street is a brave step away from traditional skatepark design, showcasing a selection of completely unique, user designed, skate-able sculptures.

City Mill Skate has been a passion project for us, not least due to its close proximity our local skate-scene, but also its alignment with our ethos of collaborative design. We are proud to have been closely involved with the project from the design workshops, through technical design, securing planning permission, and eventually construction of the space.