Work has started to transform the skate park at Rushcliffe Country Park.
The skatepark will be completed 2021 and will join other new facilities in the borough, including ‘The Hook’ skatepark at Lady Bay, which opened in May 2019, and Radcliffe-on-Trent skatepark, which opened earlier this year.
Nottingham and Nottinghamshire are amongst the original homes of UK skateboarding, with a 50-year history in a sport. The area may be represented in the Tokyo Olympics in summer 2021 by local professional skateboarder and Skateboard GB team-member Alex Hallford, who grew up skating the original wooden parks at Lady Bay and Ruddington.
The sport has a unique ability to encourage interests in film and photography whilst the experience teenagers gain from building wooden ramps with their friends can progress into careers in civil engineering and architecture.
The new skatepark will have a ‘plaza’ style layout, simulating the street furniture favoured in modern skateboarding along with beginner-friendly features, elements designed for BMXers, and materials and sustainable approaches to construction that are sensitive to the country park setting.
© westbridgfordwire.com
This will complement the more ramp-based design of nearby Radcliffe-on-Trent, a project that was led by the local user community and supported by their Parish, Borough and County Councils; and the mix of ramp and street features at Lady Bay, which was also designed in close collaboration with the user and resident communities.
Because of its community-led approach, Lady Bay skatepark was a finalist in two categories in the 2019 East Midlands Celebrating Construction Awards. Rushcliffe’s free, outdoor public skateparks will closely meet the needs of the two Olympic skateboarding disciplines: ‘park’ (bowls, ramps etc., as found at Radcliffe-on-Trent) and ‘street’ (hand rails, ledges, steps etc., which will be incorporated into the design in Ruddington).
