Manufacture: Betongpark Ltd

Crew shot 2024: Sam Elstub.

I do think it’s still that ambition and focus on true quality that sets us apart. That, and us all being skaters, of course.

So Daryl Nobbs, where are we?

We are in sunny Essex, in a rather idyllic spot on the edge of the River Crouch I believe, in Hullbridge, where we’ve just built a new bowl.

And a fantastic looking bowl it is too.

It looks really, really fun. It’s one of the most exciting things we’ve built in a little while, for me. I definitely say that about everything that we do, to be honest, but just doing a little standalone bowl is fun. Being able to just go and session a bowl on its own with a crew, it’s the same as when you all go and session the same mini ramp; it’s something quite special.

How much freedom do you have to implement quirks into a project like Hullbridge?

It varies from project to project, and I think again that’s why this one has been a particularly fun one, because we had a pretty open brief from the get-go. The two guys running it from the council, Adam and Dan, are both so awesome. They both skated in their youth, and it felt like they really backed our vision. One of the dudes went to school with the Dring brothers.

We knew when we were coming here that there’s always been such a sick scene around these parts, especially the four to six foot ramp skaters, you know - your Phil Cluttons, your Jon Haywards. For Hullbridge, we knew we could kind of have a bit more fun, and that it was actually going to be worthwhile. Sometimes you can build the coolest stuff in the world but if it’s never going to get used properly then it’s kind of a shame. This one is close to London, it’s close to us, it’s close to scenes with lots of ripping skaters… It’s going to get skated.

Daryl Nobbs: Director/Bossman/Binman - Frontside blunt, Chelsea Flower Show. Photo: Leo Sharp.

Hullbridge is one of two builds you’re working on in Essex at the moment, right?

We’re also working on one just down the road in Rayleigh, where we’re doing the complete opposite, and building some clean street plaza type stuff.

So between the two, you’re catering for a range of skaters.

Exactly. Originally, the tender was for three projects, and fingers crossed there is still the third project on the horizon as well. Our approach to it was to create three parks that each offer something completely different, and then people would move around, instead of trying to build a little bit of everything in each one and just creating three diluted parks. We wanted to do a sick street one, a sick transition one, then we’re going to do some weird nibbly flow thing on the other one, hopefully; make a point of moving around from park to park. That’s what makes skateboarding cool, isn’t it? Moving round from spot to spot, meeting different people… I hope this idea encourages that.

So winding the clock back quite a few years, to before Hullbridge or even Betongpark, tell us a bit about your story please, Daryl. Who are you? Introduce us to ‘Cov Sid’?

(Laughing) My story… Yeah, I’m Daryl Nobbs, also known as Cov Sid, and I’ve been skateboarding for a very, very long time. I grew up skating in Coventry with the amazing scene that was there at the time, with Jim the Skin (Paul Atkins) and all the Ride crew, and some – to be honest – not quite good enough skateparks for the level of the skaters Coventry had. I was really fortunate to grow up in an amazing time for skateboarding in Coventry; it was a real golden era. I learnt how to slap my tail from the very best, Jim the Skin, and I hope I can still do justice to that (laughs).

Dom Alden: Landscape Architect - Rocket block, Hereford. Photo: Rob Whiston.

You fully ran that one as well. You were loud back in the day. If you got in there for a bowl or a mini ramp jam, you knew on sound alone when it was your run.

I don’t know if I still have that much wallop, but we’ll see how it goes later on (laughs). I did the sponsored skating thing for a little while; I used to get boards from Heathen, shoes from Vans, and all sorts of other bits in between. Somewhere along the way I kind of found that I was a bit better at building skateparks than being sponsored. It’s not for everyone, and I have so much respect for the people who can run with sponsorship, but for me, it wasn’t what I was meant to be doing.

Pete nobbs and his legendary coping. Photo: Alex Irvine.

So when and why did you first turn your hand to DIY?

To be honest, when I first saw Strongest of the Strange (by Pontus Alv), when I was far too young to be doing any DIY; I must have been 12 or 13 when that came out. In the tiny little market town that I grew up in, a little way outside of Cov, I managed to get together a load of friends, and we walked together into the woods until we found this old slab that was really overgrown. We dug it all out; we had these big plans to build some Steppeside shit (laughs). We had a few days in the summer making the place look beautiful, then we had zero idea of where to go next, because we didn’t have money, a driving license, or any of the required things that would help you to build something, so that never took off. >

Years later, my family moved down south to just outside of Croydon, that’s where I met Felix (Parker), then we started throwing bits of DIY together. I met Danger and Sean Gutierrez when they came over, and I showed them around a bit on some Consolidated trip. They were about to go to Copenhagen and start the park over there, and that was the final stoke in the fire that I needed to get into it properly. From there, I went and got a job at one of the existing U.K. skatepark construction companies, basically as a labourer, being the most junior guy on site, cleaning tools and making tea for people who didn’t skate. It took a little while to get here from there, coming up to 15 years, but seeing how other people worked made me want to do things our way.

After I met Danger on that trip, I got a call from him a year or two later. I’d been learning a bit in that time, and he asked me to go help on a little project in Copenhagen when Fælledparken was coming to a close. I helped him out there and was like, “this is what’s up. I’m actually working with a bunch of skaters who are incredible craftsmen. This is exactly what I always wanted it to be”.

Ewen Bower: Fabricator - Seatbelt grab, Stockwell. Photo: Rob

It definitely seemed around 2009, 2010 onwards, Alex Irvine through the work he was doing at Kingpin, Pontus (Alv) and the crew in Malmo, they definitely pushed DIY to the fore again.

Massively. People like Alex really gave it a platform, all whilst being fully involved himself, and loads of spots kept popping up. At that time, I was dipping in and out of different companies from job to job, doing bits in Europe with Alex, then started doing the odd job in Sweden and Denmark with Danger and those guys; it was a joy, man. You could just move around and be involved in whatever was going on. We did these amazing trips with Kingpin, where it was me and Alex and Felix… Bless him, Felix; he’s been working with me for so long, the poor dude (laughs). We went to Berlin, did some stuff in Italy, went to Warsaw…

Oh, I skated the spot in Warsaw, with the whippy mini ramp.

Did you? The small halfpipe?

Yeah, I took a good slam on that, looped right out of the side.

(Laughs) That thing was brutal. That was a Burn Energy sponsored event, so on the last day Rune (Glifberg) showed up, and a couple of other heavy hitters, not really knowing what to do with the place that we’d just spent a week building (laughs). We worked for a week through the rain. The day we tried to do the concrete, it rained for 30 hours straight. We had this big inflatable tent to work under, it was the only tent we had, and you had to plug it into the generator to run it. Every time you moved the tent, it would come unplugged and deflate, and we had to keep moving it to work on different sections, so you kept getting electrocuted trying to plug it back in (laughs).

I’ve heard electrics and rain generally don’t mix.

We were with all of these Finnish dudes who were there for the trip, rippers, kind of helping, kind of just bringing the good vibes, me and Felix went into the container and were like, “right, one of you guys need to plug the tent back in, because we can’t take another electric shock”. There was this one dude, Mika, he gets up and he’s like, “hey, I’ve got it, man. All energy is good energy” (laughs). He went out into the rain, plugged it in and got zapped. But he was hyped. We were like, “ok, you can stay on”. It’s worth noting this was a DIY project, and nothing to do with how we operate at Betongpark (laughs).

Felix Parker: Site Foreman - Crailblock, Horsham. Photo: Alex.

I’m picturing that like something from a cartoon. Did you see his skeleton through his skin? Did his hair stand on end?

I swear, man… Almost (laughs). We did manage to build some good stuff there, though. I got such gnarly concrete burns on my feet on that job that I ended up having to make some DIY sliders out of Alex’s old shoes, just so I could walk around in rainy, cold Warsaw. It was called S.O.S: Save Our Spot. We were going to existing spots and trying to help a bit, fixing up fucked up old parks, and getting involved in some really cool DIY projects. That was the trip where I met Jan Kliewer, Lennie Burmeister and those guys in Berlin for the first time. We met Max and Dan out at 2er not too long after. All those guys obviously became massive parts of the skatepark world with Yamato and Endboss. What’s nice is that so many people that I met around that time are now the ones who have these sick companies. It’s still all the same homies who, at the time were working on DIY projects, are now the ones who are running things, if you can say that (laughs).

Knowing all of those guys so well, and seeing a park for the first time, you know who’s designed and built it. It’s so easy to spot a Yamato park and know how those guys skate, and the cool shit that they build is suited to that. Again, my homies in Denmark do the FSR stuff, and you can visualise them skating in their parks just by seeing a picture of it, and I hope we do a little bit of the same with Betongpark.

Ben Rutherford: Designer - Noseslide, Finsbury Park. Photo: Rob.

Jumping the North Sea then, what is the history of Betongpark? Where did Betongpark come from?

Betongpark was started over in Norway coming up to 12 years ago now, by Kasper (Helle) and (Øyvind) Hammer, two ambitious, inspiring, and probably a little naive Norwegians (laughing). This was when there were basically no concrete parks in Norway as a whole. They were building an industry and a market from the ground up, which, in itself, is a pretty unique position to be in. Most countries in Europe have had some level of concrete skatepark being built for a long time now, good or bad, just like we have in the U.K. Aside from a handful of crappy pre-fabs, it was so fresh over there.

Yeah, how many towns in the U.K. have got a 20-year old flatbank, driveway, quarter setup?

Exactly. Betongpark was an opportunity to start a fresh designing and building, having learnt lessons from what we’d seen and done before. I ended up going out to help on their second project over there, when they didn’t really have a build crew and they were finding their feet. I met those guys, we hit it off, and I basically came in to start setting up the construction side of things from ground zero. I set up their first proper build crews, before leaning more into the design side of things, then just helping as much as possible to run the company.

It’s funny how it works, because we have these two established companies now, one the U.K. and one in Norway, and in the U.K. we’re like, “we’re bringing some of that Scandinavian flavour”, but in Norway they say, “we’re bringing some of that U.K. flavour” (laughs).

Jake Welch: Site Foreman - Nosegrind, Stockwell. Photo: Rob.

We don’t need to be big profile or high budget, but we do need a client that wants to work collaboratively to create something awesome.

Like Norwegian black metal colliding with, I don’t know, psychedelic English rock from Coventry.

It’s Scandinavian minimalism, paired with tight transitions and big bowls (laughs). Working in Norway taught us so much. We are working in some of the harshest conditions in the world, and building to withstand that. On top of that we created a skatepark scene and a market from the ground up, where some of the most ambitious projects in the world could happen. Every shape of concrete you can imagine, skateparks popping up in almost every school… We had a lot of incredible ideas to bring home! I do think it’s still that ambition and focus on true quality that sets us apart. That, and us all being skaters, of course.

When I relocated back to the U.K., I hired another designer to help me, Dom Alden, and from there it started to gather a bit more momentum. In terms of us getting set up over here, Hackney Bumps came along, and if that perfect storm hadn’t happened - the pandemic and the awesome community coming together to overhaul that space - we wouldn’t be sat here today talking about Betongpark in the U.K. The Bumps were so pivotal. I first met Nick (Tombs), Sam (Elstub) and a bunch of the guys down there, and it snowballed to the point where we polished the park and made it look amazing, and started building all these new ramps. A little while after that, the Leigh-on-Sea project happened with ‘Gorgeous Dave’ Watson from June Store, then off the back of that, a tender came out for Cann Hall, which is in the next borough over from Hackney. Ordinarily, I thought we’d never go after U.K. tenders; we’d have a little design office and feed into Norway and do some consultancy bits. At the time I thought it was too much to try starting a building company; it took The Bumps to inspire that for sure. Off the back off of what we managed to do with The Bumps, when the Cann Hall tender came out, I thought, “shit, we actually have a build crew that’s naturally formed… We could actually go and build this park”. So obviously I called Felix (laughs), dragged him back into the mix, and then we built Cann Hall. From there, I knew that we had something. With the U.K. I thought the market was a little bit saturated with companies that weren’t really doing anything new, and I thought it would be really hard to compete against companies that don’t care about things as much as we do.

Joe Walker: Machine Operator/Nozzleman - Nosepick, Horsham. Photo: Alex.

In a way too, a lot of the companies you might be competing against on tenders, they might not have the passion that you do, but they speak the language that the councils wants to hear.

Exactly. It takes a moment to figure out how to present yourself, and it also takes a moment to figure out how to run a company too (laughs). For us, we also need to be sure that the client and the project are both right for us. We don’t need to be big profile or high budget, but we do need a client that wants to work collaboratively to create something awesome. They need to appreciate the extra effort and the extra skill we bring to the table.

Stuart Maclure: Development Manager - Boneless, Stockwell. Photo: Rob.

Culturally, it probably gets no more significant than being asked to refurbish Stockwell. Can you tell us a bit about that job in particular, and any other builds you’ve done that are milestones for Betongpark in the U.K.?

The funny thing with Stockwell is that it was actually going to be the only park that we did in the U.K., because it was first mentioned so far prior to me even living back here. I skated there for years, know all of the locals, came over periodically, spoke to the council, gave them advice and wanted to make it happen. For me personally, Stockwell is one of the most important parks in the world, so we were always going to try and refurbish that. We bid on it originally as the Norwegian company, it didn’t work out, then everything went to shit and it sat there, not happening for a few years. In those years, I’d moved back to the U.K., The Bumps happened, we built Cann Hall and all of these other skateparks, then Stockwell came back around. I was like, “here we are again, on the one park I thought we’d do in the U.K.”… It was fate, man.

So Stockwell was a big one, but give us a couple of others, a few more jewels of the Betongpark CV.

I think we’re really lucky to have gotten involved in a whole manner of interesting projects, on every scale imaginable. The new stuff at Hereford is a massive one for sure, getting to make a crazy downhill track into massive 70s inspired basin. Finsbury Park has to be up there too; naturally a controversial design, but one that made a definite impact on the London scene. And hey, we just built a big ass park in France. On the other end of the scale, we put in a new ledge at Southbank, which was this logistical nightmare, trying to get accumulatively five tonnes of material from Spain to London, and into a space with a really, really low ceiling. That, in itself, was insane. One of my personal proudest projects is Clinker, a little side hustle I set up with my dad, the legendary Pete Nobbs, producing some pretty incredible pool coping. I’m sure the guys in the office are pretty tired of hearing about it after a good 12 months of R&D (laughs), but it was all worth it! Thinking back to the earlier stuff, Forest Row was such an amazing project. Felix and me used to skate it a lot when it was the original DIY style layout, and then a really sad story happened down there with Hugo Palmer, a local skater who went missing on a trip abroad. This incredible family got in touch for us to try and help with an extension in his memory. That must have been the first park we did after Cann Hall, and it flipped how we did things again, taking things back to a somewhat DIY approach. It was such a memorable project, one of the most fun builds we’ve ever had, because we could hang out with the community there and do something special. It almost went down the road of being something simple at first, then after a while we thought, “look how weird this place is. Let’s make it weirder. Let’s keep it unique”.

The thing I’m the most proud of is the people who work for us. They have so many different talents, and I think that’s how we are able to work on so many crazy different projects.

Ryan Price: Stowaway - Blunt indy, Hereford. Photo: Rob.

Then you get Diggs (English) and Lucy Adams there for the opening.

What more can you ask for, than to see people like that skating your parks? It’s amazing. We were still just finding our feet with Forest Row, still piecing together the crew and finding out what we could do over here.

The difference between then and where we’re at now… Now we’re like a pretty well oiled machine. We have two construction projects on going with an incredibly skilled crew, we have the Hackney office full of immensely talented people. The thing I’m the most proud of is the people who work for us. They have so many different talents, and I think that’s how we are able to work on so many crazy different projects. We can do the Chelsea Flower Show, we can design a skatepark in the Arctic Circle, we can build a Plaza in Finsbury Park, we can make ramps for Tyshawn (Jones) to ollie over (laughs).

: Josh Cole: Specialist Skatepark Builder/Concrete Finisher - Layback backside smith, Stockwell. Photo: Rob.

Since you mentioned it, tell us about the Chelsea Flower Show, because that was a mad one. Tom Tanner was down with The Ben Raemers Foundation crew, and he said he’d bail a trick and his board would be nearly colliding with people like Carol Vorderman (laughs).

That was a surreal one for sure. It came about off the back of City Mill, which was another incredible project that we worked on with Dr Esther Sayers, Sam Griffin and UCL, taking collaborative design to another level. Sam’s friend Louise (Page) has Planet Good Earth, this awesome CIC that encourages young people to learn about how food is grown, and what food can do for your health, both mentally and physically. I don’t know exactly how it worked for them, but they got a grant to work at the Chelsea Flower Show, and then pulled all of these elements together. So there was a hint of City Mill, us, Planet Good Earth, and Urban Organic, which is run by another skater, Jack (Astbury), who is making these incredible edible landscapes. We all came together to make this piece of carved out granite that was skateable with all of this beautiful, edible stuff around it (laughs). The work that Sam, Stu, Jack, Louise, and the whole team put into it was incredible. For me, Chelsea was a stop-off on the way. We were going to show the ramp off there, where hopefully some decision makers would see it, and it could have some positive impact on the world. Then it went on to live forever at Hereford, which is completely community managed, and I couldn’t think of a better home for it to end up at.

Everything that is shown at Chelsea has to be relocated to help their environmental impact, but I don’t think anyone has ever relocated a Chelsea garden in such a short space of time as we have (laughs). We heard people there talking about relocating in a year, a year and half’s time. We managed to relocate all of the timber, all of the granite, and I’m pretty sure – apart from the ones that I stole for my dinner on the last day of the show – all of the plants. It’s now planted, sat there in Hereford, looking beautiful, forage-able for the new café that has opened at the top of the skatepark. I shot a photo on the quarter in Chelsea, then two weeks later, Clev (Ryan Price) shot a photo on the same quarter over a hundred miles away in Hereford. That’s just proof of what skateboarders can do; you wouldn’t find that drive to make things happen anywhere else. It was a shit load of work handling the logistics, then at the same time, on the other end in Hereford, they were there, ready to receive it, ready to put in the volunteer hours. We had all of the local community helping, and that’s skateboarding.

There is a hint of everyone in Betongpark in every single thing we’ve ever built, and that’s rad.

Sam Elstub: Chartered Landscape Architect/Designer- Wallride fakie, Hackney Bumps. Photo: Rob.

Alright Daryl, let’s wrap this up. Is there anything you’d like to discuss that we haven’t covered?

All I want to say is thank you to everyone that makes up Betongpark, here in the U.K. and in Norway, and thank you to everyone that trusts us to make fun stuff to play skateboards on. There is a hint of everyone in Betongpark in every single thing we’ve ever built, and that’s rad.

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