I moved to London last summer and didn’t have a place yet, so Stu from Lovenskate and his wife Juliet let me stay at their house for the first month.
After a week or so I had some spare time and I wanted to do something in return for their kindness, so I started fixing up the garden a bit. Just basic stuff like cutting back trees, picking weeds, tidying up, etc. They had this old concrete structure on the lawn that must have been a coal shed once, all rotten and full of you-don’t-wanna-know-what.
One evening, after I finished most of the garden work, Stu and me had a brew and took a closer look at that shed and started to just fantasize about building a little concrete mini there.
The thing was that the flat they live in isn’t theirs and the garden is shared between the neighbours. A couple of days later Stu and Juliet talked to them to sell them the idea. The deal was that we’d tidy up the entire garden, get rid of the ugly shed and in return be given green light to put a little mini there. The icing on the cake would be a solid BBQ that they could use.
They bought it, but we couldn’t tell the landlord, so the restriction was that the mini couldn’t be bigger than the actual shed. That restriction was a big limitation but a thrill at the same time, to squeeze in what’s possible on that small of a space. I’ve never built a solid concrete miniramp other than occasionally patching stuff together in the street, and I got really excited.
The next two to three weeks were tons of fun and a lot of lessons learned. A highlight was definitely taking down that shed with a sledge hammer with Stu, boyee if you’ve got some agression stacked up that’s the moment to let it loose! Really therapeutic… And learning things I’ve never done before, like pouring a foundation or laying bricks. There were lots of old bricks around from a wall that had come down, really beautiful weathered ones in different shades of red and yellow. I think I spent two entire days just cleaning off the old mortar and dirt off the bricks with a wire brush. For the first fifty or so it was quite enjoyable, but after three hundred you’re definitely over it. After cleaning them up I did a loose layout of the ramp to see how it would fit.
Bricklaying is quite tricky if you’ve never done it before. The tricky part you gotta figure out is how the bricks intertwine, corners are simple, but the BBQ was to link into a wall and that’s where it gets a bit more complex. Another thing is the mortar, the mix you gotta do is not like the one for concrete, you gotta get it more mushy to apply it to the bricks so that it sinks into the hollow space of the brick when you lay them. If it’s too dry it’s not gonna squeeze and stick to the stone, if it’s too wet the stones sink and don’t stay in place. My dad was a bricklayer and got pretty psyched when I called him up for advice. My friend Sebastian Denz learned it too, so I consulted him as well. The first row was a lesson learned, but eventually I got a hold of how to do it and it was good fun to see it all grow, piece by piece…
Another sick thing was that so much trash became a valuable piece of the puzzle, the old bricks for the sides and the BBQ, the smashed up shed for hardcore, a scaffolding pole for coping, wood we found in skips for the shuttering and so on.
The only stuff we had to buy was the concrete and mortar, a couple of tools and screws and chicken wire for rebar.
After three weeks we finally did it and had a first go. That’s a hard one to beat, the first drop in on your own spot. In the end the ramp turned out a little gnarlier than we thought. Skating it feels like someone threw you in a tumble-dryer, there’s almost no flat, it’s just a meter-ten wide and the trannies in that sort of setup feel pretty steep with a meter-ten radius. There’s just no time to relax at all. You gotta get the rubber-legs out and have your guard up at all times ’cause when you slam you’re 99% bound to hit something unless you leap out onto the grass.
Anyway it’s good fun, thanks to Stu and Juliet for giving me shelter, food and beers! Thanks to Kev, Ewen and Marto for the help and to Sebastian Denz and Matt Grabowski for letting me get on their nerves. Good times!!
Words + animation: Lars Greiwe
Skate photos: Rich West
Construction photos: Stu Smith
Super good story!