After a ‘soft’ opening in the depths of winter (ie. the park rangers stopped trying to kick us out and the fencing came down), the official Crystal Palace Skatepark Summer Jam 2018 will see South London’s newest skatepark properly opened with a full day of shredding on August the 25th from 11am – 4pm. Crystal Palace has a special place in South London’s skate history, with its vert ramp (which lay under one of the walkways along the same path which leads to the current set up) acting as the catalyst for sessions with the likes of Lucian Hendricks, Phil Burgoyne, Deaf Rob and many more. For a proper history of the ramp from those who were there, check out the brilliant article on the place released by Caught in the Crossfire a few years ago featuring interview with many of the OG locals – many of whom the Crystal Palace Skatepark group are planning on getting down for the jam. You can then ingest more Crystal Palace history via our recent interview with Lucian Hendricks.

The park as it stands now consists of two bowls and a street course. The pool style bowl skates like a mellower, slightly bigger mirror image of Shoreham Bowl, with Viking Blocks pool coping offering up that proper crunch when you throw a truck on either the 9′ deep or 6′ shallow. The middle bowl is 7′ and 5′, clearly laid out more for BMX lines with round hips and plenty of flat bottom but still offering up some high speed approaches and the deep end skates well if you use it like a miniramp…hesh points immediately lost there, right? The street course is small but fun and, to be honest, gets left as a form of scooter containment zone for much of the time. As you may have gauged from that quick park overview, this is definitely one for the more transition leaning amongst you – if you want to pretend your Bill Danforth, say, you’ll probably have a better time than if you want to get uber tech. That being said, the park is in a rad, tucked away location so even chilling and watch people doing frontside grinds is an afternoon well spent.