The Rainbow Ground

A destruction picture, one of many. You get the idea.

No matter, inception of the next endeavor has cast its shadow upon the earth. Plotting is (very slooowly) afoot…

Friday 13th July 2012

I woke up to the phone ringing. It wasn’t good news.

A security firm had been employed by the landowners to secure the premises, and level the ramps after some kid had apparently hurt himself over there, or they suddenly realized the potential pending lawsuit, that to them was essentially an ‘extreme’ playground in a building site, cheekily sitting on their forgotten about patch of vacant/stagnant ‘real estate’ and got paranoid. 

I apparently had a few hours to salvage anything I could, have a last skate on whatever I could and bid it farewell. The anxiety I felt on arrival was different from the usual building-day anxiety, there was no nervous excitement, just paranoia. I mooched about, took a few more pictures and salvaged 3 bits of metal and an old shovel. I put a padlock on the main gate just to inconvenience the security for my own amusement, and then I left. 

Rather than the precision S.A.S like security operation sweeping through the place, knocking and locking it down in the next few hours that was professed in that phone call, apart from taking the opportunity to get some free advertising for their security company on the fence around the land it remained pretty much untouched for the next 2 or so weeks until they actually got their shit together, fixed up the fences and rolled in the bulldozers to ‘disable’ the attractions.

When I say ‘bulldozers,’ in reality I think they used a mini-digger, but the end result is of course much the same. I did at least get to go back in afterwards to take a few pictures, and as a minor consolation managed to salvage all the remaining bits of metal coping as well as the one piece of pool coping that had been used. Oh yeah, and I’ve got a souvenir piece of transition off the quarter-pipe sitting in my garden.

We always knew the day would come, it was always in the pipeline. This blog remains in it’s memory, as do the lessons learned whilst doing it. And hopefully also so you out there can see what is actually possible if you just go and get busy.

It can be massively daunting for the potential budding DIY enthusiast to get motivated to make a start on a spot when faced with images of Burnside and Steppe-(it up)-Side and 2er and, well all of the other wonderfull DIY projects going on around the planet that are built by constantly growing gangs of friends and volunteers who all seem to know exactly what the fuck they’re doing.

The scale of things being done and documented out there can easily make it seem as though you’re never going to get anywhere if there’s just one or two of you with little or no experience or money. So remember, the achievements that follow below, despite having some help on and off (Gorgeous Dave - legend), are still largely the work of one man.  

So always remember the imortal words…

“Beautifull Things Are Temporary.”

..and go get busy.

PC

My original ‘artists impression’ (back of an envelope sketch up) vision that was pretty much exactly (more or less) what we built.

I bloody this this badboy, it’s the fecking future!

And so, the last concrete that was or will ever be laid there. This picture was taken on Friday the 13th July 2012, about an hour after I got ‘the call…’

12th July 2012.

Whilst all this was going on, the volcano has been slowly deteriorating a tiny bit at a time thanks to construction errors, impatient scooter kids and pricks that just can’t help but further break shit that’s already broken a bit. It’s broken window syndrome unfortunately. Attention was now turned back to securing and resurfacing the fallen beast….

11th July 2012

Filled in all of the exposed sides for vandal resistance

4th - 6th July 2012

Fixed and set.

1st July 2012

Straightened shit out ready for the fix

27th June 2012.

Vandalism.

25th June 2012.

Keen to keep going, Dave instigated the next bank item. Sadly, this never saw any further progress before contracting a bought of ‘the vandals’

Angles

Beautiful