The Rainbow Ground

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.