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How many bikes does your family own?
About 14. I’ve actually just sold one of my BMXs last night,
but I’ve got two BMXs, a Gary Fisher cross country bike and
a Chopper. Both of my kids have got a couple of BMXs each and trials
bikes and they’ve both got mountain bikes as well.
Do you have any plans for any more?
Bikes? Oh aye - I think I’m gonna get one of these Curtis 24
inch wheeled things that’s made of T45. We only stay about
10 minutes by bike from the park, and my Gary Fisher’s aluminium
and I don’t want to bust it. I just want something that can
be chuckable, that’ll take a doin’ with a good stand-over
height, so if you make a balls-up, you can stand off it and not
get a ball in each pocket! And I’m gonna get another BMX as
well and make myself something kind of nice.
What do you do by trade?
I’m actually a welder by trade, but I’ve been in the crane
hire industry for 20 years.
Has any of that helped with putting the park together?
Well, because I’ve been in business for a long time, I had
the capital to sustain the park whilst it wasn't earning any money
due to it being unopened. I also built my own boat years ago, so
that gave me a kind of insight into working with timber and I also
built an extension onto our house as well, so I’m no stupid.
But at the same time building ramps isnae rocket science, but then
you’ve still got to get it right, you know?
Which of your sons would you say is more
of a nutter?
The youngest - Conner, he’s er, pretty wild on skates right
enough. But he can skateboard, ride bikes and skate, and hold his
own in each, where as my oldest son, Chaz, he is more into bikes.
But the two of them also both like wakeboarding, so anything at
all - we do lots of things, not just biking. But I would say that
Conner’s more inclined to hurt himself because he’s wild,
you know?
Have they had any broken bones?
No, they’ve not broke anything, but they’ve both had surgery
from accidents - you know, crashing in the street and things like
that. They were both bike accidents from jumping things and racing
and things like that. So that was one of the reasons that we looked
to build the park - even if we’d taken on an industrial unit
and converted it into a private park for them two, I would have
had to do something, just to take them off the street, you know?
What’s been the hardest thing about building
the park?
The uncertainty - this HSC carry-on. If anyone’s been to the
park, they’ll know that we’re in the vicinity of this
gasometer, which is entirely nothing to do with the park and has
been there since before the war. So the uncertainty, because it
was taking them so bloody long to do this risk assessment report
which, when it came back, said that they ‘advised not to advise
against development’ which is a double-negative. So at the
end of the day it’s only my money that’s tied up in to,
but a lot of people have put a lot of effort into it. At the same
time, I knew that I would get the permissions and I would get everything
tied up at the end of the day, but it just took a long time. I thought
we would get everything sorted in a three month period and it’s
taken seven or eight months.
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