Roman Candle Magazine

It probably goes without saying that bike riding relies pretty heavily on ‘spots’. Whilst some strange folks are content with the reliable, safe-play environment of the local pre-fabricated skatepark, anyone with anything about them will soon hanker for new surfaces to touch tyres (and occasionally pegs) on.

But unlike more accepted (and slightly mumsier) pursuits such as hiking or whale-watching which are aided by exhaustive guide-books and extortionately-priced package tours, there’s little information out there to help you in your quest for banks, benches, banisters, hubbas and hitching posts.

Magazine captions give away slight clues, as do landmarks and road signs lurking helpfully in the corners of fisheye footage – but outside of that, you’re mostly just left to pedal aimlessly and hope for the best.

Having said that, there is one seldom-talked-about tool out there that’s helped countless riders, skaters and moody teenagers in the United Kingdom find somewhere to while away their time – the Knowhere Guide.

Launched back in the early, frontier days of the World Wide Web, this simple, text-based website allowed the general public to recommend (or slate) the spots in their local town. And beyond just telling riders and skaters where to find stair-sets and smooth floors, it extended into a guide for everything that’s often overlooked, from the best chip shops in town to the finest bus stops to sit and drink a bottle of White Lightning in.

The site still exists today, and whilst it’s maybe a bit dated in the current age of high-speed virtual reality streaming, it remains a pretty fascinating time capsule of the late 90s in Great Britain and a glimpse at the early promise of the internet.

Tim Leighton-Boyce and Paul Sanders were the masterminds behind the guide. Here’s what they had to say on the matter…

How did the Knowhere Guide start? Am I right in thinking it was originally just for skate spots?

Tim: Yes and no. Knowhere itself was never just about skate spots. But its origins date back to a paper-based directory of UK skate spots which first appeared in a newsletter published by a skateboard retailer, Alpine Sports at the start of the 80s. That listing was created at a time when all the skateboard magazines had collapsed. I ran the skate mail order department of Alpine Sports and was aware, from letters mostly, of all these skaters who had been cut off from any form of mass communication but wanted to know what was going on. And where to skate. So I started to expand the mail order price list into something a lot more.

The printed version of the listing had many different names. But the original data was carried forward and expanded as a continuous process. The Alpine newsletter evolved and expanded. It changed its name to Alpine Action. The company folded but before it collapsed they sold off the skate (and by now BMX side) to some of the people who ran it and the new shop adopted Alpine Action as a name. I did not join them. One of my great mistakes. But they were all friends and I was very close to them.

I ended up concentrating on photography with a side-line in digital stuff. I gradually got more involved in BMX Action Bike magazine. I think we may have started publishing a version of the guide in BMX Action Bike and then R.a.D. It may sound odd that I can’t remember clearly, but it was a long time ago. I would need to check the magazines for dates and for what it was called at that point. It’s had some very cheesy names in its time ‘Concrete Corner’ was one of them, I think. Or is that just a bad dream?

A critical point in the evolution of Knowhere was the brief flash and burn which was Phat magazine. R.a.D magazine was sold out from under the editorial team yet again, so we tried to launch our own magazine called Phat. The distributors were insistent that it must not be ‘just’ a skateboard magazine. We had to be very careful to avoid the skate content dominating, even though our motive was to produce a skate magazine. So as part of that, the ‘where to skate’ guide dutifully started to include other types of listing. If I remember correctly the name also changed in a relevant direction and it was now called “Where?”

Phat exploded after three issues in 1993 and I had nothing to do. Gavin Hills said he knew some people I would find very interesting. He took me along to Brick Lane where there was an empty old brewery. There were three businesses in it at the time, if I recall correctly. A car park, a music hall and, in one big office with big windows and a very big table, Oscar Music. The interesting people were Paul and Phillip who ran Oscar Music and certainly did interesting things. The interesting things were to do with music. And they were exploring digital things such as broadcasting MIDI files via TV on Tomorrow’s World (or something like that) and interactive disc-based media like CDi.

The timing of that meeting was perfect. The web had just been invented and the earliest graphical browsers such as Mosaic and Netscape were about to appear. The great thing people said about the web then was that suddenly “everyone had a printing press” – the distinction between publisher and consumer had been removed. And it was true.

Paul: I was doing some music projects at the time, but thinking that online technology would have a big impact on lots of things. When it became possible to make a website, we decided to try and were having ideas about who we wanted to be looking at it. The descriptions of the places in the guide had all been sent in by readers of the magazines, and Tim organised them into a database and edited them so they read well. We started off by doing an output of the database and using some code to chop it up into web pages. Then I thought we should let people contribute directly.

There were a few categories other than skate spots – newsagents where you could buy skate mags, cheap food, hook up spots (meeting your friends rather than dogging – that came later…), and I think the notorious best and worst were already there.

So the main influence was what Tim was already doing, but with some changes for the Internet age. We were looking at some online bulletin boards too, and the alt.* internet newsgroups which were pretty wild. And communities like the Well in California.

When did it first go online? What was the internet like back then?

Tim: I think it probably went on line in 1994, not 1993. The internet had been around before then, but this was the point when general use started to take off. The invention of the web and browsers with graphics and sound, combined with commercial organisations like AOL making access relatively open, triggered an explosion. It was very exciting. Very new. It felt like a whole world was opening up. Which it was. I’m so glad I got a chance to experience that.

Outside of the guides you’d already done in R.a.D and the like, was it influenced by anything else?

Tim: It seemed like a natural progression from those guides. In my case it was also an extension of the free classified adverts which we used to publish in R.a.D. I was very keen on those. They were like a public bulletin board for readers. Those messages were also a precursor of what was about to happen. I wanted to level the playing field so everyone could have their voice heard.

The guide didn’t just focus on big cities, and there’s pages on pretty much every town in the country. Was it important for these places that are often ignored to have a presence?

Tim: It was extremely important. That was more important to me than the big towns and cities because the big places are always well-served. R.a.D had always been about covering what was happening in as many places as possible. Everywhere was just as important.

Paul: When it started to take off it got us thinking about a whole lot of things. One of them was how sometimes a place might be called all sorts of things by local people, and might even be considered to be in a different place. My view was that people’s opinions were more true than the official data – which you couldn’t get anyway because the government controlled it and wouldn’t let us use it.

We let people suggest new places to add, and took the names and locations they gave us rather than checking on a map. So even the geography itself was user generated.

I also thought it was very important to be vague rather than trying to give every curb or wall a latitude and longitude. Local people knew where things were without looking at the OS map, and we didn’t want to make it too easy for the authorities to use Knowhere to organise patrols or for dodgy people to target young people.

There’s some pretty wild stuff on there, with a few people getting named and shamed. Did anyone ever have to step in and delete anything?

Paul: Yes. We’ve had big and small vendettas, and a few times the police have been involved either to keep the peace or because someone posted information about crimes. It’s very hard to get the balance right and we try very hard to go for free speech, so we’ve had a few moments. When we added message boards it got wild. But it also got really creative and we had some strong communities inhabit Knowhere for a while. There’s no need for that now with Facebook and Twitter.

Was it annoying that something that was set up as something helpful eventually become a forum for small-town beef… or did you anticipate that all along?

Tim: This is something that mostly happened after I was involved. I did not anticipate it because I had not really experienced it before. In retrospect my life during R.a.D magazine was like being in an echo chamber. The people working on the magazine and the people reading it shared a common interest and that was the focus of our dialogue. For example the free classified messages sometimes contained a slight element of local rivalry, but not much more.

Once the listing went on line and started opening up for other content things started to change. The thing which also started to happen when I was around was people trying to get in touch with old school friends. In retrospect we might have spotted the user need for something like Friends Reunited and then Facebook. But at the time I certainly didn’t.

Paul: It’s still much, much more than a forum for small town beef, but I didn’t find it annoying – and I still don’t. The language people use is amazing, so they are obviously putting some thought and effort into the helpful and informative stuff as well as the complaints and insults.

What happened as well is that the users got much more diverse, and we encouraged that by adding many more categories of information. When small towns still had record shops and music venues we had quite a big community of musicians and gig-goers.

Adding pubs also took the average age up a bit, and adding clubs brought in another group – the Saturday night lads and lasses, and some boy racers. We knew these moves would have their downsides but they also added a lot of depth that keeping it pure would have missed out on.

What’s the Knowhere Guide’s current status?

Paul: It’s still up – you can still add stuff, and people do every day. We’ve had a few ideas over the years for ways to change it, and we have something in the works now. There’s no way that Knowhere can compete with the combination of Facebook and Wikipedia though.

I think there is something relevant Knowhere can do today, especially as we can see the downside of social media.

The guide was based around sharing information – what are your thoughts on people keeping their cards close to their chest and being secretive about spots?

Tim: I accepted that as a reality of life. There were places which we never listed or kept the details very vague. I think Droitwich banks were an example. We didn’t want to be the instrument which wrecked a place.

I’m not really sure if there’s a question here, but the guide really captures a certain time in England – there’s a lot of flat-rails behind supermarkets, damp bus shelters and kebab shops.

Tim: I really liked that aspect of it. I wince that you use the word ‘England’ because R.a.D was very keen to cover more of the UK. One of my favourite entries was for Tayvallich and there was someone who used to get in touch from Stornonway. I liked hearing about the scenes in places like that, where the fewer people and less choice of where to skate. I also liked the edgelands of the cities, like you say they would be round the back of somewhere – places other people ignored.

Do you think the entries would be much different today?

Paul: Yes – very different. For a start when we put Knowhere online nobody could just post stuff on the internet – we were one of the first wave. So the language people used was very different. Plus there was a general lack of information available about the sorts of places we had – a massive gap between the tourist guides and the Yellow Pages basically.

The local papers also felt they had the monopoly on local opinions and were often outraged by the fact that their own readers could express themselves on the Knowhere Guide. I think the views and the way they are expressed were more direct and less self-regarding too, but that might be me over-interpreting. It was really obvious however when we got a contribution where the writer was trying to write a proper review, and those were quite rare.

I think we captured in public some of the stuff that now goes on privately through phones, private groups, and social media. But the strong instinct to share is still very much there. I suppose it was a precursor to social media and the current age of everyone airing their opinions.

What are your thoughts on the internet today? Has it lived up to the expectations you had back in the early 90s?

Tim: Yes. And the most important aspect of that is outside the big ‘western’ countries. Phones have changed everything. The real liberation is what’s happened to people in very different worlds from mine. But you mention ‘social media’ and when I think back to the early days of that, when they called it ‘Web 2.0’, I remember thinking at the time that this was not new. It was just like the early days of the web when everyone tended to assume that they could put content out there and that they could email companies and bands (we were working for record labels) and get a reply.

That was suppressed for a bit when commercial organisations upped their game and produced slicker content and tried to restore the ‘few to many’ publishing model.

Social media was the same user need (I want to say something and I will) bubbling back up again. It turns out that things were not quite that simple. Big business pushes back. The big platforms are now being viewed with suspicion and hostility. It’s like the tide flowing in and out. The tide is immensely powerful and the shape of the coast changes.

Paul: I knew in 1992 that the internet was a revolution, and that’s what drove me to develop my business (mostly music now, but broader back then) at a time when there was not much money in digital media.

It’s interesting that the fundamental technology is still very similar to what it was in say 1996 – it’s just faster and more ubiquitous. Maybe we’re due another revolution. I don’t know what my expectations were other than that we would be connecting one to one and many to many around our shared interests, and that seemed to me a creative opportunity as much as anything.

I did expect that the trivial would be right there alongside the bigger and more important stuff, and that was one of the things I really still love about Knowhere.

Definitely. There’s a lot of ‘everyday’ things on there that most people overlook. As someone involved with the internet fairly early, how do you see the web going in the next few years? Should people be worried?

Tim: I think the thing called the ‘web’ and concepts like ‘web sites’ have become less and less important. I spent the first years of my digital work trying to explain to people what web sites were, and for the last few years I’ve been trying to explain that they’re not a useful concept any more. The internet is being used to communicate and share knowledge in so many different ways, and I believe that expansion will continue. As with medicine and electricity, I think the ever-wider use of the internet is transformative and mostly in an extremely positive way. 

There have been several different waves of attempts to make use of the internet conform to earlier non-digital models and then to earlier versions of itself (assuming an ‘it’ as viewed from various perspectives). What actually happens is always slightly new and different. People want to communicate. Some of what they want to communicate has always been very divisive and repugnant to different people, but broadly speaking I think that will sort itself out over the generations as it always has.

Paul: I’ve got a deep optimism that, given the right information and the ability to choose, people will generally do enough of the right thing. What is hurting now is that the owners of the platforms are hiding so much, and controlling the choices we have so that our friendships and family connections are hostage to their greed and irresponsible spying on us.

You could look at the last ten years as one huge experiment on humanity, and what’s good is that the subjects of the experiment are learning from the results. I’ve written about this in the context of music and I think the same forces and principles apply everywhere.

So yes, we should be worried enough to look for the right thing and do it when we can, but I’m not predicting dystopia or internet-induced fascism. We need to find a better way to contextualise what we see and experience online, so we don’t give the harmful things the momentum they’d otherwise lack.

But the original skaters who were part of Knowhere in the early 90s, and I’m sure your readers now, don’t think of themselves as helpless victims of online sociopaths, and will call out bad behaviour when they see it, and that is all that it takes to get us through this phase. One thing I am very sure about is that we’re not going to deal with our problems by becoming less connected to each other.

INTERVIEW ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED IN RED STEPS ISSUE 4