Contact Me
If you find a website, video, or just something interesting wandering around the WWW, please feel free to contact me and I'll take a look. If it makes the site I'll return the favour by offering you a discount on a private lesson or group course.
There are lots of sources of information about inline skating around the WWW and finding them has proven a bit of a challenge. So here's an ever growing list of things I've found that may be of interest to you, or just have some novelty value!
Disclaimer: I am not responsible for the content of third party sites.
Skate Shops
- Club Blue Room
- Based on the corner of Edgware Road and Marble Arch, Club Blue Room are one of the largest skate shops in London. Their staff are friendly and extremely knowledgeable, and their skate stock is pretty vast and includes decent hire skates. I highly recommend them and, if you buy a new pair of skates from them, you can get a free 1 hour starting and stopping lesson from skateinstructor.com (ask for a flyer).
- Slick Willies
- Down on Gloucester Road, Slick Willies is a small shop with a pretty reasonable stock. Their staff are friendly and they offer hire skates, although I have not been impressed by the quality of these. They do offer one service worth of note for most skaters: if your bolts get stuck in the frame they have a tool that should be able to remove it for you.
- Loco Skates
- I've never visited this Eastbourne based skate shop but I've heard some extremely good things. They've recently (October 2008) revamped their website and prices seem quite reasonable when compared to some of the London stores.
Other Instructors
All of the instructors listed here are ICP qualified, an international qualification. This means that they have been taught to teach in a structured and proven manner. I recommend you look for ICP qualified instructors first for this reason.
- SkateFresh
- Run by Asha Kirkby, SkateFresh is one of, if not the, longest running skate schools in the UK, certainly in London. Asha's a wonderfully talented and graceful skater, and the ICP UK director. She's one of the few ICP level 3 qualified instructors and is an ICP level 2 examiner. SkateFresh do lots of work with children, but cater for, pretty much, all inline skaters.
- skateinstructor.com
- Having worked for skateinstructor.com and with Mark Davies, another of the UK's top ICP qualified skate instructors, I can vouch for their teaching. Their Sunday Beginners session is a great way to start your skating experience.
- LondonSkaters
- An extremely familiar and popular face on the UK skate scene, Mike van Erp is a really good inline skating instructor. His speciality, in my opinion, is that he can make you skate faster and his website, LondonSkaters, is a great resource for skating related information.
- Skate Freestyle
- Not only is this probably the best looking skating site I've seen in a while, it's also the online home of Naomi Grigg. She happens to be ranked something like 3rd in the world for slalom, one of three ICP level 3 instructors in the UK, and a really friendly person.
Organised Street Skates
NOTE: All of the street skates listed here are free, just turn up at the right time in the right place and skate. For the UK based skates, at least, no donations are taken over the web; they will accept donations but contact them first for information on how to do this legitimately.
- The London Friday Night Skate & Sunday Stroll
- Run every week, throughout the year, the LFNS and the Sunday Stroll are staples of the London skating scene. The Sunday Stroll is an entry level skate run at a nice steady pace for novice skaters every Sunday afternoon. Friday nights are the home of the LFNS, which is a much faster and longer street skate. If you're looking to get onto the Sunday Stroll consider my Sunday Stroll course.
- The LondonSkate
- Probably the most enjoyable street skate in London with, what can only be described as, a noisy-and-fun environment, the LondonSkate is run on Wednesday evenings during the summer months.
- The Pari-Roller
- If you're in Paris on a Friday evening and are looking for around 10,000 people to skate with, drop by Montparnasse Station. Super smooth streets, a fast pace at the front and a slower pace at the rear, and police on skates (with guns!). It's a great skate and should be OK for those of you who have done a LondonSkate.
Skate Manufacturers
- Seba
- Seba, or Universkate (if you're asking for them abroad), have a range of skates designed by Sébastien Laffargue, who happens to be one of the best skaters in the world. I have a couple of pairs of their FR1 model, which has become popular amongst London skaters, and know that people rate their Seba High model.
- Rollerblade
- Synonymous with inline skating, Rollerblade have become a household name. Their Twister skate, which is oddly missing from their website, is a pretty decent skate for a beginner as it has decent ankle support (but try on other skates because the width might not fit your feet).
- K2
- If you're a beginner you could do worse than look at the range of skates offered by K2. Lots of my students turn up in either their Exo ALU or Athena ALU skates, depending on whether they are men or women, and seem to do well. I do think they are skates you grow out of, progressing into something a little more robust as your skating gets better.
- Deshi
- Deshi are an aggressive skate manufacturer but, by the looks of it, their new Carbon skates are going to be similar to the Seba FR1 skates in size.
- Remz
- Although I've never tried their aggressive skates they do seem pretty popular amongst professional skaters, so they must have something right? Their website is pretty funky too, especially the 'Live It' bit!
- Razors
- Aggressive skates come in many flavours but, I'm reliably informed, Razors are "the best". Better be because I picked up a pair of the G7 skates at the beginning of 2008, but have yet to actually get out on them in earnest.
Magazines
- rueda mag
- With both Spanish and English versions this online aggressive skating magazine has a wonderful interface: it feels like you're actually reading a magazine but with a more dynamic page.
- Kingdom Magazine
- A UK aggressive skating magazine which you should be able to pick up in skate shops.
- One Magazine
- Another aggressive skating magazine (are these the only magazines people are interested in reading I wonder?) but this one you can read online in PDF form.
Online Forums
- Serpentine Road
- The online home of UK inline skaters. Be warned that, whilst they are really nice people, the tone of some replies might offend!
- Camberley Skaters
- Forums, tips and information from the Camberley Skaters. They also have a Twitter account where forum posts get tweeted: @cskate.
- Roller En Ligne.com
- A French forum for inline skaters which covers pretty much all aspects of inline skating. It's all in French so either you have to be pretty good at reading French, or you can try the (sometimes weirdly) translated version via Google.

