So what’s this street-skate thing all about then?

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It does exactly what it says on the tin. You skate. On the street.
You’ve tried out your in-line skates in the park and you want to stretch your legs a bit. You want to go faster! You want to go further!! You want to have MORE FUN!!!

You’ve seen the odd inline-skater weaving in and out of traffic and you’ve thought, ‘Hey, that looks cool. I’d love to skate on the road like that – but I don’t want to die as young as they will.’ So you join an organised street skate.

Street skates take a group of like-minded people and allow them to skate together along the streets of London, protected from the traffic. There are three main street skates in London – one on Wednesday evenings, one on Friday evenings and one on Sunday afternoons. All of them are marshalled with volunteers in hi-vis vests blocking side roads and doing their very best to stop traffic hitting you and (just as important) you hitting either traffic or pedestrians. Streetskates travel along carefully planned routes and the police know we are coming.

How good do you have to be?

That depends on the skate. If you have to ask the question (or if you have no experience of London street skates), we’d recommend you start with the Sunday Stroll.

The Stroll is designed for first time street skaters and it is shorter (around 6 – 8 miles) and slower than the other skates. And it runs in daylight (on Sunday afternoons).

The Wednesday Night Skate is faster and the Friday Night Skate is even faster still. (Gulp!)
You will be skating in a group of people so it is important that you can keep up. The speed varies a bit from week to week, according as to how many people turn up and how bad the marshals’ hangovers are but it’s usually kept reasonably slow. Remember that it is eight miles in two hours and think of a reasonable jogging speed. If you’re not sure, turn up and try it. If you can’t keep up, just drop out and practice in the park for a bit – you’ll be fast enough in no time.

You must to be able to turn and stop confidently because there’s people around you. And some hills may be included (there’s more than you’d think in the centre of London) so you must be able to stop on a slope. (There’s a slope that runs from Speaker’s Corner to the Hyde Park Corner end of Serpentine Road. If you can stop at the bottom of that, you’re fine).

How do I join in?

Just turn up. The Sunday Stroll leaves from the Hyde Park Corner end of Serpentine Road at 2.00.pm every Sunday it isn’t raining. There’s a map at www.lfns.co.uk and we post our weather-dependent go/no go decision there as well.

You’ll need your boots (obviously) and we recommend helmets, kneepads and wrist guards. Carry a bottle of water too in the summer months.

The street-skates cost nothing to join. That’s right. It’s free. And the organisers aren’t asking for donations over the Web either – so if you donate to anyone in that way, the money doesn’t go to them!

Are there any rules?

Yes. We’re skating on public roads so we have to skate together to keep you safe from traffic. If there’s a gap in the skate, cars will sometimes try to cut in. So we ask people at the back to skate faster. And, if they really can’t, we sometimes have to ask them to drop out. I know. It’s a bummer – but you don’t want to hold up everyone else do you? And you will get faster. And we’d like to see you try again.

We do try to keep people in the skate if we can. And we are sympathetic. But, in the end, keeping the skate together is essential to safety so we have to go at a speed that everyone is reasonably happy with.

Two other things:

Please keep off pavements. This is a street skate. If you want to skate on the pavement, don’t join a street skate. And if you do skate on the pavement and knock over a pedestrian (or even just frighten someone) they could complain and we could be shut down. Please don’t do it.

Keep left. In order to keep the skate moving, marshals have to run ahead of it. Then you pass them at a junction and they have to run ahead of it again. They will (usually) pass on the right. So please keep left. Also, extensive tests have shown that when skaters move onto the right of the road and go head to head with the traffic, the traffic usually wins.

The legal stuff:

You have to be at least 16 years old or accompanied by an adult who stays with you on the skate.
You skate at your own risk. Really. In-line skating is a risk sport. If you don’t want to risk getting hurt, don’t do it. If you do it, take care and remember, you are responsible for your own behaviour.

Q. Am I good enough?

You need to be able to keep up, know how stop well, perhaps downhill and be able to turn at fast speeds around tight corners. Safety is the key. If you are in any doubt, book a lesson to assess your ability and get you up to speed.

To get you ready we will aim to teach you:
Fast skating (Stride 2)
Emergency stopping.
Rough surfaces including coping with manhole covers, cobbles and holes.
Fast ascending and decending curbs.
Jumping over stuff. Wheeeee!
Fast acceleration.
Parallel Turns.
Steps.
Control up and down hills.
T-stop/spin stop combo.
Skating in a pack.
We all fall down every now and again. Read about how to fall as safely as possible here.