Yeah they don’t fuck about! Who else was heavily involved in the building process?
Lewis: Warren Munson, definitely.
Jack: I feel like Warren should be here really. Warren is Mark’s younger cousin or nephew and he’s an absolute man machine – got that Munson blood in him. You could hear him within five minutes of him walking out the back going “Oh that needs smashing down” and picking up the sledgehammer.
Lewis: “Oh you want that done do you?”, and he’d pick up the tools. He knocked down the jersey barrier which was here single handedly with a sledgehammer until two in the morning, if that gives you some idea…
Harry: He started, realised what he’d started and that he had to get it done because it looked a state in the park. He just got himself stuck in after that.
Jack: So he’s definitely a big piece of the picture, he’s done fucking loads and he’s just a machine. He’s one of the ones who you know that if you start and you’re going until the end then he’ll be there until whatever time it’s done by. But mate, there’s been so many people…
Harry: Yeah there has been a huge amount at different points. It’s four years, getting on five if you think about it for this to be done. The original owners had all the hardcore delivered, they had a vision to build a pool but their eyes were just way bigger than their budget.
Jack: It started off with a big pile of dirt and Carl telling the geezer where to put it, then we thought to get cages – you know the motorway ones you see at the side of the road? We got a bunch of them, started to lay it out and got a guy to clean it all up with a mini digger; but he was a bit of a twat, gave a dodgy invoice and fucked it all up. This was all the previous owners…
Harry: A lot of people used to take advantage of them. So they went, “Hold on, if this is costing what it is then how are we going to budget for the rest?” We realised we couldn’t do it with diggers, so Carl said let’s just do it ourselves. We then built a couple of tiny bits, they were alright for a while but that was real early.
Jack: It was the first time anyone had built really, I think we’d clocked a documentary on Youtube of someone building a DIY skatepark.
Lewis: And Urbside, that set things off.
Jack: So then we decided we could do it, built a couple of bits, built a couple of more bits and then we decided to actually get stuck in. One guy’s dad works on sites and he managed to get loads of concrete one time, dropped it off in a pump truck.
Harry: He was pouring a load of house fittings and said if he got the opportunity then he’d over order and give us a call with as much advance notice as he could. He’d ring me up some days going “Someone’s coming down now, give them 20 quid when they arrive”. Some days I was literally on my own, it happened on one of the hottest days of last year. We’d had a couple of rough plans for the underlay but nothing proper; it turned up, we undid the back, threw down a load of sheets of wood and a load of it got dumped. We’ve only had one wheelbarrow the whole time, it’s fucked! I just started throwing it on and trying to get a rough shape. But once we had that rough shape man, it was on – we had to get it done. There was some stress on the fact that every year we’ve kind of done something different, whether that was change the driveway, build extensions, whatever else. We kind of like to reinvent ourselves as best we can, keep it as fresh as possible and bring people in over the winter. Now hopefully next year and in general, people will be down making use of the space that we’ve got that’s never been used before. It makes it feel a lot bigger!
