While Nick was filming his ‘Excursions’ part for Vans he made a few trips upto Leeds. Nick and Rye were out filming one day and I joined them. Nick kills it and always has something for every spot so we decided to hit up this triple road gap, which has been around for decades. This was one of the first Leeds spots to be published it was featured in ‘Skateboard! Magazine’ around 1990 with an ollie photo over one of the road gaps and it was captioned ‘Rollie’ as in ‘Road Ollie’. The horrible looking building is an old car park which was considered ‘futuristic’ at the time because you drive you car into a lift and it takes you to your parking spot.
Anyway, this spot isn’t the nicest spot to skate, the floor is pretty rough and you have to be quick footed if you want to skate more than just the first road gap. Nick eyed it up and ollied all three of the road gaps first go, no sweat, as per usual. He then started trying to skate it a bit differently by ollieing the first gap then doing a flip trick over the second, this is where things started to get difficult.
It didn’t take Nick long to work out the spot and he started trying to 360 shuv the second road gap. I was shooting it as a fisheye sequence but it wasn’t really working out photowise so I decided to think where else I could shoot it. Eventually Nick landed the 360 shuv and then started trying a 360 flip over the second gap, I knew this would be a more photogenic trick, I remembered that Rory McKenzie once filmed from a different angle at this spot once before and it looked rad but only for certain tricks, so I thought I may as well go up there and have a look.
I got up there and it looked ideal for the 360 flip. I played around with different angles and then watched Nick battle with the trick. It was taking him longer than usual and I was hoping he would stick it. Eventually he landed it and the photo looked right from that angle. This photo ended up being my first Sidewalk cover and was used for Issue 209, I was stoked and Nick deserved it because he is such an underrated skater.
