Read and Destroy want to turn their skateboarding archive into a book

Read and Destroy began life as a magazine in 1987 and aimed to capture the most fascinating and authentic insights into the underground skating scene in Britain over the last 30 years. Now, they want to turn their impressive archive into a book.

London-based Dan Adams and Andy Holmes have put together a Kickstarter to enable publication of highlights from this archive, where they intend to re-release exclusive unseen photographs, in a two-volume hard-back book.

Speaking to It’s Nice That, Adams says, “In my formative years, I was heavily involved in the skateboarding scene of London. I watched the culture move from a place outside and hidden from the mainstream to becoming a major influencer of wider youth culture and trends in art and design. I feel that it’s time to re-evaluate this foundational time and place, opening it up to a new audience before it is forgotten and buried. The American scene has been relatively well documented and I felt it was important to expose the British part of skate culture to a wider audience.”

“I love magazines. I think this is in great part due to discovering skateboarding through the pages of 1970s Skateboarder magazine from the USA. It was well designed, lavishly printed and the photography was outstanding. Even to the untrained eye, it was clearly a superior publication. This was followed some years later by Transworld Skateboarding in the US. David Carson was cutting his teeth here and pushing the design to interesting places. I want [the book] to have all the visual power and interest that those original magazines had for me.”

The book revisits the early rise of skateboarding in the UK, its perceived “death”, the move towards BMX culture, and the eventual powerful resurgence of skateboarding as the influential cultural phenomenon that it has become. They aim to use graphics – paste-ups, Xeroxes, and mark-ups as a reflection of the processes involved in publishing magazines 30 years ago.

To donate to the project, you can visit the Kickstarter here