It’s finally here. After nigh on a year’s serious toiling we can give a definitive answer to those endless Facebook messages asking ‘is it ready yet?’ On Friday, December 12th we’re giving our customers a pre-Christmas present and opening up the brand spanking new House bowl, giving Sheffield the gift of some serious indoor concrete: 62 cubic metres of it to be precise, along with 168 tonnes of backfill, 33 pool coping stones and around 82 feet of metal coping.
Yes, it’s been a while in the making but with good reason. Unlike the way in which regular bowls are constructed, by digging downwards, this bowl has been built from the ground up. Not wanting to risk destabilising our Neepsend building’s foundations and killing everyone horribly, we had to build the bowl backwards, putting in supporting walls and platforms to create the L-shaped bowl, which stands at 5ft at the smaller end, and around 6 ½ ft at the higher. Everything we do at the House is made by skaters for skaters, and the bowl was designed by Rob, and it’s creation project-managed by Joe 90, who brought his bowl-building skills to the enterprise, along with a lot of stinking death metal and politically incorrect dancehall.
We’re really, really grateful here, not only to the House staff who have put in an extraordinary amount of work and sacrificed many pairs of shoes to the crete, but also the volunteers from the scene (and not just from Sheffield) who gave their time and limbs to this frankly insane project. Thanks then, go to Joe, John, Hat, Matt, Matlok, Shaun Williams, Ben, Dave, Joe Marks, Joff, Adam Lowther and Adam Taylor, Kizz, Max, Liam, Ronny, Elvis, Shaun Currie, Mandi, Nathan, and Martin, Charlie, Tristan, Snoop, Scott, David with a special thanks to U2 for virusing Joe’s iphone and really putting him off his stride at times.
In January 2015 we’re planning three official launch party events for skate, blade and scooter, and we’ll let you know more when we’ve firmed up the details. But for now, come down and get riding it, it’s what it’s there for. Hope you enjoy it.
