Daily Stoke For The Average BlokeHow lonely lockdown car park skate sessions turned into the Dadlands scene.
Despite the feeling of being constantly on the edge of an impending apocalypse, we live in a time when being able to grow old disgracefully is easier than ever, especially once you realise that stretching and not drinking every night improves things. Some take up running; join a gym; do Kundalini yoga; stain the kitchen ceiling while brewing kombucha to improve gut biome; ride choppers – Carhartt on your back, Minoxidil in your hair, blue pills in your pocket… You can carry on till the final tick of that internal clock.
And some skate. For the longest time, skating was something you outgrew as real life yanked you away from glorious youth to more sedentary pleasures. Yet, for some, skateboarding wasn’t a tryst of youth, but a love affair they couldn’t walk away from.
It takes a certain kind of masochist to enjoy repeated hippers on concrete as part of their fun. The remainers, many with kids of their own, skated less, skated slower, but they carried on. Skating in your 30s in the noughties definitely made you a stand-out weirdo, but on dark nights all over this country, people that should have known better carried on.
One was Russ Cowling. We’ve known each other for about 30 years, and, unlike me, he’s never stopped skating. Now in his mid-40s, a schoolteacher, an Insta scroller and a dreamer – and the dad behind skate community, Dadlands. The rest of the words here are his.
How and why did Dadlands start?
I never stopped skating, but I definitely slowed down. Having two kids, priorities change, then during lockdown I was skating more. I had time on my hands and was going to a local car park. As time went on I was getting bored, so I started building little ledges and things. That went on for a few months, then our mutual friend, Adam, joined me one Sunday morning with a couple of other friends.
He found all the little obstacles that I’d built to skate hilarious. He said, ‘You’ve got your own little skatepark. It’s Dadlands, isn’t it?’ He coined the name and it really tickled all of us because Radlands [skatepark, Northampton] was the mecca for us as young men.
I already had a couple of clips from the car park sessions, so my friend Shannon and I thought it’d be funny to get the Instagram name for Dadlands, rip off the Radlands logo, and put all our little car park clips on there.
Having skated all these years, I’ve got friends across the UK, and they were posting similar lockdown clips from car parks. I messaged a few asking for clips to pop on Dadlands, just for just for a bit of fun.
That was it, a lockdown bit of fun with an Instagram feed that escalated?
Unlike many things started in lockdown, Dadlands has continued to grow. There are not many rules to follow. My criteria is you must be 30-plus. You don’t have to be a dad, it’s anyone that looks like they’re a dad. And the footage has to be in a car park.
You know, you travel the world. You check out all these amazing street spots, but as kids, the local car park was where you went, you waxed the kerbs, and you manualed the islands. I go out for an hour on my own, prop my phone up and off I go. That’s the Instagram account, it’s dad’s shooting video clips.
And that was the entirety of the plan: ‘A daily stoke for the average bloke’. I think it resonated because a person sees someone like them in a car park doing their thing. Not everyone has someone to skate with, but you can go to your local car park on a Sunday afternoon, film a run, send it to me, I’ll pop it up on Dadlands, and you’re part of a crew, you’re part of a culture, and feel part of a community.
You make a zine as well…
People from all across the world started to send me photographs and some of them were almost too good to pop up as a random post. People can take amazing photographs now, Digital SLRs and fisheyes are readily available. It gave me the idea to put them in a little book, Dadlands, so I made the first one. Then a guy from a little T-shirt brand contacted me and asked if he could put an advert in the next zine. I hadn’t even thought about the next one, but it got me thinking: I could charge for an advert and that will help me produce more copies of the zine. I knew a few people at skateboard distributors and contacted them, so from the second issue onwards there were proper brands advertising in it. The first issue was quite small, the second and third issues were a lot more substantial. It’s quite well loved. We’ve had pro photographers submitting photos. It’s been amazing.
After lockdown, Dadlands started an annual competition as well, right?
From day one I had the idea to meet up with people sending me clips. I wondered about a doing a friends road trip, but it was a bit of a logistical nightmare. Then I remembered RAD magazine [the UK’s main skateboard mag for years] would have renegade car park competitions in a random place. The only thing stopping me was insurance, we live in a different world these days.
Then Toby Batchelor from Rollersnakes skate store contacted me. He was already sending me clips, and out of the blue he messaged, ‘Rollersnakes are now on an industrial estate, and they’re converting their car park into a low-impact skatepark.’ A Dadlands park, pretty much. Nothing is over knee-high and they’ve got the best curbs in the UK. The ideal combination!
Mike Wright and Andy Horsley got involved. Andy was photographer for Sidewalk magazine, and they run an Instagram account called the Groans Brigade [a joke based on the famous Bones Brigade], which is also about low-impact, mediocre skateboarding. It was the perfect storm.
When was the first one held?
In 2021 at Rollersnakes, Derby. We thought, It’s a free event, if we get 50 people turn up we’ve smashed it. The sun came out on the day and 200 people signed up, plus spectators! It was an amazing day, the oldest skater was a 63-year-old woman. We had people from all over the country. We were blown with the support, it completely took us by surprise. Perhaps after lockdown it’s what people needed.
One guy couldn’t come to the comp, because he’d just had the snip, and everyone was, ‘That’s so Dadlands!’ because it is, because we’re all in this boat. We’re going through all these things, but we all understand. We’re all still hanging in there by the skin of our teeth.
Is there an actual winner at the Opens?
We’ve got prizes. The trophy was a hip replacement joint mounted onto a little plate. One of things that’s super nice is we know so many people, so we get so many prizes. We’ve had three, what we call, Voltarol Opens. now, all at Rollernsakes. All the money we raise goes to the Ben Raemers Foundation that deals with mental health issues [the foundation is named after a world-class skater from Essex who took his own life].
What’s in Dadlands’ future?
I’m not sure. Even three-and-a-half years in I’m still gobsmacked that it’s even a thing. The support and love is something else. I would like to mention the Ince brothers, Damian and Steven, whose dad, Chris, built Radlands. He is the ultimate, the dad of all dads. He owned and built Radlands, when he was about our age, and deserves an OBE for what he did for UK skating. I checked with Damian to see if he was OK with me using the name Dadlands. He said, ‘It’s keeping the name alive. I love it.’
I think people can see when something’s been planned and when something’s just grown organically. I think that’s why people back it.
Words: Matt Letch Photos: Pete Falkous, Rob Galpin, Robert Walton, Tim Smith
First published in Issue 3 of Bother Magazine, December 2024.
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