After six months of hard advocacy, a temporary skate park has opened in London, Ont.
In the fall of 2024, a group of young activists put together a petition which garnered over 1,000 signatures.
Saturday night, they made it a reality at Silverwoods Arena - with more than 60 children and adults present on opening night.
“It’s something I want to do because you don’t get to skate a lot in winter, cause there’s not a lot of places you can go,” said Genny Cook, 9, who was rollerblading.
Following the popularity of a world-class indoor skate park for ten days at Western Fair in Sept. 2024, the wheels were put in motion to make this happen.
They had a number of hurdles to overcome including requiring a 10-million-dollar insurance policy and needing the city to help find them an empty venue.
“London has over ten skate parks during the summer, but in the winter, that goes down to zero,” said Ken Galloway, the head of the SUMMIT, a youth empowerment charity.
“If you look at every other municipality around us, they have winter skate offerings for free. This is something that was worth fighting for and putting this together on our own volition, we can encourage the city to adopt this.”
Among the dozens of attendees were members of the five action sport disciplines. There were skateboarders, in-liners, roller skaters, scooter and BMX riders.
“It’s very humble with temporary obstacles - but, through demonstrating the need and the impact and seeing the looks on these kids faces, we’re hoping to demonstrate to the city that this is important,” said Galloway.
The importance is not lost on those in attendance. Skater Bowaine Ma came from Lambton County for opening night to enjoy the physical and social aspect.
“I think getting kids out to be able to skateboard indoors is a great alternative for physical health and social as well, and especially for the women’s community, LGBTQ plus community,” said Ma.
“There aren’t many options for us to get together in the winter, especially with the ice shelf on the lake, and then the skate parks here are all outdoors.”
This is the only one of its kind in the city of London with the closest park in Kitchener.
Each Saturday night at 6:00 p.m. they bring in ramps, and rails to transform the empty cement pad into a park.
The evenings are free thanks to generous sponsorship from HandyBros who covered the cost of the arena rental.
“A decade ago I worked at this little one called Revert Indoor Skate Park in a church and it was a great experience working there, but it wasn’t permanent,” said Zach Almeida, co-founder of London’s HZRD Skateboarding, and the man who started the petition.
“It didn’t last and obviously this thing isn’t permanent yet either, but it’s just another demonstration to show how strong this community is and how badly we need this.”
With Londoners Richie Bullbrook and Cordano Russell ranked number one in Park and Street skateboarding in Canada, the local community is fighting to show this sport is mainstream.
“It’s not fringe anymore, it’s in the Olympics,” said Jim Travis, director of the London Skateboard Co-op.
“We need to foster the younger generation of skateboarders so that we have Olympic athletes in our cities. That’s important to a lot of people that maybe don’t understand what this is all about.”
