The History of Southbank: London’s Most Important Skate Spot
How an accidental brutalist undercroft became a five-decade home for London skateboarding — and why generations of skaters fought to keep it.
Southbank Undercroft, 1976. Photography: Brian Gittings. Courtesy of Long Live Southbank / Southbank Centre.
Beneath one of London’s most recognisable brutalist buildings is a patch of concrete that became one of the most important places in British skateboarding. The Southbank Undercroft was never designed as a skatepark. Skaters simply found it, used it and, eventually, fought to keep it.
Skateboarders began using the Undercroft beneath the Queen Elizabeth Hall in the early 1970s. Its banks, ledges, pillars and sheltered concrete made it a natural street spot, and over the following decades it became a meeting point for generations of London skaters.
When redevelopment threatened the space in 2013, the Long Live Southbank campaign helped protect it. Today it remains one of the most important surviving spaces in British skate culture.
Southbank mattered because people did not simply skate there. They grew up there.
Five decades beneath the Southbank Centre
Undercroft created
The Queen Elizabeth Hall complex creates the open concrete space beneath the Southbank Centre.
Skating begins
Skateboarders are recorded using the Undercroft from as early as 1973.
The space evolves
Skate-specific additions become another layer in the history of the spot.
The campaign saves it
Long Live Southbank forms and the redevelopment threat is eventually withdrawn.
Restoration begins
Long Live Southbank and the Southbank Centre begin working together on the site.
Five decades marked
Skate 50 recognises around fifty years of skating at the Undercroft.
An accidental skate spot
Southbank’s importance begins with the fact that it was never supposed to become a skatepark.
The Queen Elizabeth Hall and the surrounding Festival Wing were developed during the 1960s as part of the Southbank Centre complex. Their architecture created large areas of exposed concrete, raised walkways and open public space beneath the buildings.
To most people, the Undercroft was simply part of the architecture. To skateboarders, it looked completely different.
Concrete banks became transitions. Ledges became obstacles. Flat ground became somewhere to practise. The pillars created natural lines through the space, while the roof provided something particularly valuable in London: protection from the weather.
By the early 1970s, skateboarders had begun using the Undercroft. The Southbank Centre records skate activity there from as early as 1973, making it one of the earliest important sites in British skateboarding.
The architecture already contained everything a street spot needed
- Core feature
- Banks, steps, ledges and level changes
- Skate value
- Natural lines without built ramps
- Legacy
- The building became the obstacle
Natural terrain
Banks, steps, ledges and changes in level created lines without needing a purpose-built ramp.
- Core feature
- Concrete structure overhead
- Skate value
- Shelter from London weather
- Legacy
- A reliable meeting place
Shelter
The concrete structure above meant skaters could use the space even when London weather made other street spots difficult.
- Location
- Beside the Thames near Waterloo
- Skate value
- Accessible across London
- Legacy
- A meeting point for generations
Central location
Sitting beside the Thames and close to Waterloo, the Undercroft became an accessible meeting point for skaters from across London and beyond.
From skate spot to skate community
The physical space explains why people started skating Southbank. It does not fully explain why they kept returning.
Over time, the Undercroft became as much a social space as a collection of obstacles. Younger skaters could watch experienced locals, learn tricks and meet people without joining a formal club or paying to enter a skatepark.
That matters because skateboarding culture has traditionally been passed down informally. Style, etiquette, tricks, music, clothing and even the knowledge of where to skate move between generations by people spending time together.
Southbank became one of those places where that exchange happened naturally.
The most influential skate spots do more than produce tricks. They produce communities, images, style and ideas.
Southbank recorded changing British skate style
- Early years
- A culture still finding its identity
- Later decades
- Wider trousers, graphics and oversized layers
- Legacy
- One location records several generations of skatewear
A living backdrop to British skate style
Look through Southbank photographs from different decades and the skateboarding changes, but so does the clothing.
Early photographs show a culture still finding its identity. Later decades bring wider trousers, graphic T-shirts, sweatshirts, skate shoes, caps and oversized layers that became increasingly recognisable as skatewear.
Southbank therefore provides something unusual: the same physical location can be used to trace different generations of British skate style.
The concrete stays relatively familiar while everything around it changes.
The space changed as the culture around it accumulated.
Graffiti changed the space too
Southbank was never visually static.
Graffiti gradually transformed its plain brutalist surfaces, turning pillars and walls into continuously changing layers of colour, lettering and imagery.
That visual identity eventually became inseparable from the skate spot itself.
Skateboarding, graffiti, photography and filming were all happening within the same relatively small area. Each shaped the way the others were documented and remembered.
The threat to Southbank
By the early 2010s, Southbank had already survived decades of change around it. The biggest threat came in 2013.
Plans connected to redevelopment of the Southbank Centre’s Festival Wing proposed major changes to the Undercroft area. For skateboarders, the issue was not simply whether another skateable space could be created nearby.
The existing Undercroft had history.
Its concrete had been shaped by decades of use. Tricks had been filmed there. Friendships had formed there. Generations of skaters had learnt on the same banks.
Moving skateboarding somewhere else would preserve the activity, but not the place.
Long Live Southbank
- Trigger
- Redevelopment of the Undercroft
- Response
- Long Live Southbank is formed
- Method
- Petitions, events and public campaigning
- Outcome
- The redevelopment plans are dropped
A grassroots campaign became a heritage argument
The redevelopment proposals triggered one of the most significant grassroots campaigns in British skateboarding.
Long Live Southbank was formed in 2013 to protect the Undercroft.
The campaign quickly became larger than the local skate community. Supporters argued that Southbank represented an important piece of youth culture and urban history — a public space whose value came precisely from the fact that people had shaped its purpose themselves.
Petitions, events, public campaigning and widespread support helped turn the future of a skate spot into a much bigger discussion about who public spaces belong to and whether cultural value has to be officially designed into a place.
After approximately 18 months of campaigning, the redevelopment proposals affecting the Undercroft were dropped.
Saving the spot was only the beginning
Protecting Southbank did not mean freezing it exactly as it was.
Long Live Southbank and the Southbank Centre later began working together on the future of the site.
Improvements included lighting, repairs and reopening areas that had previously been unavailable to skaters. Sections of the historic lower Undercroft were eventually restored and returned to public use.
It was an unusual outcome: the informal culture that had occupied the space was no longer treated simply as something tolerated beneath an arts centre. It became part of the recognised history of the building itself.
Southbank travelled beyond London
- Visual identity
- Brutalist columns and worn concrete
- Media
- Film, photography and magazines
- Digital legacy
- Recreated in Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 4
Southbank on film
Skate spots become famous through footage as much as physical experience.
Southbank has appeared repeatedly in British skate films, photography, magazines and international skate media. The space became instantly recognisable: low ceilings, brutalist columns, worn concrete and graffiti providing a backdrop unlike a conventional skatepark.
Its reputation eventually spread far beyond London. The Southbank Centre even notes that the spot was recreated in Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 4, introducing a digital version of the Undercroft to players around the world.
- Connection
- London skate culture and streetwear
- Figure
- Palace founder Lev Tanju
- Legacy
- Skate culture and clothing developed together
The Palace connection
Southbank's influence also runs through modern British streetwear.
London skate culture provided the environment from which brands, photographers, filmmakers and creative communities developed. Palace founder Lev Tanju is among the figures connected with Southbank's wider skate history, and the Southbank Centre included him among contributors to its Skate 50 project celebrating five decades of the Undercroft.
That connection helps explain why skateboarding and British streetwear cannot really be separated. The clothes were not invented in fashion studios first. They developed around the way people actually skated, filmed, travelled and spent time together.
Five decades of the same concrete
In 2026, the Southbank Centre marked approximately fifty years of skating at the Undercroft with its Skate 50 exhibition.
The exhibition drew on photography, film, sound and contributions from people connected with different generations of the space.
That is significant because Southbank is not simply being remembered after disappearing.
It is still being skated.
New generations are using the same pieces of architecture that attracted London skaters decades earlier. Few street spots survive long enough for that to happen.
Why Southbank still matters
There are smoother skateparks. There are larger spaces. There are places built specifically around modern skateboarding.
Southbank's importance comes from something harder to reproduce.
History.
Every generation inherited a space already marked by the people before them and then added another layer.
Tricks changed. Clothes changed. Graffiti changed. Cameras changed. Skateboarding itself changed.
The Undercroft remained.
Calling Southbank a skatepark almost misses the point. It is a piece of public architecture that skateboarders transformed through use.
Nobody originally designed its banks as transitions or its ledges as places to grind. Nobody planned for generations of teenagers to meet beneath the building, or for its walls to become covered in graffiti, or for skate photographers to document decades of British style there.
That culture accumulated slowly. It is precisely why Southbank could never simply be rebuilt somewhere else.
Final frame
A skate spot that became part of London
Southbank began as unused concrete beneath an arts complex.
Skateboarders gave it another purpose.
Over the next five decades, that accidental skate spot became a meeting place, a filming location, a canvas, a piece of British skate history and eventually a space people were willing to organise to protect.
That may be Southbank's greatest legacy.
Skateboarding did not simply use the architecture. It changed what the architecture meant.
