RAD Magazine: Britain's Most Important Skate Rag

 

This one's for the kids who knew who Neil Blender was before they knew who Tony Hawk was. Pull up a kerb.

There's a version of skateboarding history that gets told over and over. It involves California, swimming pools, the Z-Boys, the Bones Brigade, and a clean narrative arc from counterculture to Olympics. It's not wrong. It's the foundation. But the full story has a British accent, smells of rain on tarmac, and costs 85p.

What Was RAD?

 

Read And Destroy — RAD — was a British skateboarding magazine that ran from 1983 to 1993, making it one of the longest-running and most influential skate publications ever produced on this side of the Atlantic. It launched at a time when British skateboarding was essentially invisible to the American industry, and it spent a decade making sure that invisibility ended.

The June 1988 issue — 85p in your local shop— sits right in the heart of RAD's golden era. Street skating was beginning to eat vert alive. The industry was shifting. And RAD was documenting all of it with a rawness and authenticity that the glossier American titles simply couldn't replicate from 5,000 miles away.

It wasn't trying to be Thrasher. It wasn't trying to be Transworld. It was trying to be honest about what skateboarding actually looked like in Britain — which meant car parks, council estates, wet concrete, and kids who were absolutely ripping with zero industry support and zero coverage anywhere else.

The People Who Made It

 

RAD didn't happen by accident. It happened because a small group of people cared enough to make it happen properly.

Tim Leighton-Boyce was the editorial and photographic heartbeat of the magazine. His photography defined the visual language of British skateboarding in a way that's only now being properly acknowledged. He shot in conditions that American photographers would have gone home from — grey skies, wet spots, bad light — and made it look like exactly where skateboarding should be happening. His eye for a moment, for the human side of skating rather than just the trick, gave RAD a warmth that set it apart.

Wig Worland was another key figure — skater, writer, and someone who understood instinctively that the magazine needed to speak to its readers as equals, not as consumers. RAD's voice was never corporate. It was the voice of someone who'd been at the same spot you'd been at, skating the same wet ledge, and had something worth saying about it.

The combination of genuine skating knowledge, real photographic talent, and a refusal to be anything other than authentic is what made RAD matter. These weren't journalists covering skateboarding from the outside. They were skaters making a magazine.

The Numbers

 

• RAD launched in 1983, the same year the first skateboarding boom was already beginning to fade in the US
• It ran for 10 years — an extraordinary lifespan for an independent skate publication
• At its peak it was the primary source of UK-specific skate coverage for an entire generation
• The magazine cost 85p in June 1988 — roughly equivalent to £2.50 today
• RAD documented British skaters who never got American magazine covers but were, by any honest measure, world class
• The magazine folded in 1993 as the second skateboarding boom began to commercialise the culture it had spent a decade protecting

The British Skaters RAD Championed

 

Bod Boyle — arguably the most technically gifted British street skater of his generation. Boyle was doing things on street in the late 80s that wouldn't look out of place in footage shot twenty years later. RAD knew it. RAD showed it.

Colin Kennedy — Scottish, ferociously talented, and another skater who existed almost entirely outside the American industry's awareness while being genuinely exceptional. RAD gave him the coverage he deserved.

Andy Scott, Lucian Hendricks — names that mean everything to anyone who was actually there. RAD was their magazine. They were RAD's skaters. This is the thing about RAD that matters most: it created a record of a scene that would otherwise have been completely lost. British skateboarding in the 80s was real, it was serious, and it was happening in places that looked nothing like California. RAD proved it existed.

The Bones Brigade — The Heroes Who Inspired Everyone

 

RAD loved the Bones Brigade. Of course it did. Everyone did, because the Bones Brigade were genuinely extraordinary — and they deserve every bit of the legendary status they hold.

Stacy Peralta assembled something that had never existed before: a team with a visual identity, a film output, and a cultural coherence that turned skateboarding into something you could believe in. The Bones Brigade Video Show (1984), Future Primitive (1985), The Search for Animal Chin (1987) — these weren't just skate videos. They were the reason an entire generation picked up a board. They were the reason kids in Birmingham and Bristol and Glasgow were skating at all.

Steve Caballero — the Caballerial. Enough said. Rodney Mullen — the man who invented flatground skating as we know it, full stop. Tommy Guerrero — street skating with a soul that nobody has matched. Lance Mountain — the everyman who made you believe you could do it too. Mike McGill — the McTwist. Tony Hawk — the best vert skater who ever lived, and he was doing it before anyone knew his name outside of contests.

RAD covered them with the reverence they earned. But it covered them alongside Bod Boyle. Alongside the kid skating the Southbank. Alongside the contest at Rom skatepark in Essex. That's what made RAD different — it held the global and the local in the same frame and understood that both mattered.

Why It Matters Now

 

Skateboarding has a complicated relationship with its own history. The commercial version gets preserved. The underground version disappears.

RAD didn't disappear entirely because enough people kept their copies. Kept them in lofts, in boxes, in the kind of careful disorder that collectors understand. And because of that, the record survived.

Read and Destroy: The Story of RAD Magazine — the book that finally does justice to the full history — is essential reading for anyone who wants to understand what British skateboarding actually was. Not the myth. The reality. The 85p reality, bought from a newsagent by a kid in the rain who had no idea they were holding a piece of cultural history.

We've added an original RAD Magazine issue and the Read and Destroy T-shirt and sticker set to Old's Cool : 

https://olds-cool.co.uk/products/read-and-destroy-bundle-rad-t-shirt-retro-stickers-1988-magazine

Old's Cool — old school energy, new school delivery.