It has been seven years since Lee Rozee, Ian Blackburn and a few others starting grafting away at a small sliver of land between a grit depot and a factory, cleaning up the used syringes and dodging smackhead eggs to create the DIY spot which would become affectionately known as Needleside. By the end of that summer a few of us were working whenever enough people had the time off and there was money for concrete, building what could be built in such a confined space and ending up with a spot which became a regular stopping point on skate trips.

Big Push missions saw pyromaniacal quarterpipe sessions, Navarette did QP-assisted streetplants during a Creature UK trip and the needles, faecal matter and general underworld lurker detritus began to thin out before too long. Eventually a fence went up, which did little to stop sessions despite other DIY projects in Leeds coming to fruition, but it appears that whoever owns the land has finally tired of the space not being used for bodily effluent and intravenous drug use and the spot has now sadly been demolished completely.

Anyway, seven years is a long time for a DIY spot to survive so, with the help of top Leeds-based lensman Reece Leung, we’ve put together a compilation of photos he has shot there over the years – from Rozee charging, to Paul Silvester’s ambidextrous wall-crawling, to the final session with Blinky and Martyn vs. rubble strewn wallrides. Raise a glass, open wide for Needleside and then go build your own…

PS: Parfitt’s Patio was the scariest obstacle.