UPDATE: This workshop is over now, but we will be doing another one soon. To make sure you don't miss it, subscribe to our newsletter or join our Facebook group!
The times for the lessons are:
If you are interested in attending this course please contact us.
One of the joys of skating is the community that surrounds it, and nothing sums this up more than the organised street skates: The London Friday Night Skate & Sunday Stroll and LondonSkate, the regular Wednesday night skate. All of these marshalled street skates are organised by a group of volunteers and are absolutely FREE to attend.
The typical starting point, for people wanting to get into street skating, is the Sunday Stroll as it is aimed at beginners: it is typically 6-8 miles long, takes 2 hours with a short break at half time, and moves steadily. One of the problems, though, is sometimes people attend these skates and cannot stop, usually using other skaters to prevent them from shooting through the pack.
So we are running a 4 lesson course, that will take place during the weekday evenings, and will take you from a novice skater through to being able to complete a Sunday Stroll. This 4 week course costs just £60.
The first lesson takes place at 7pm on Tuesday 2nd June. You can be an absolute beginner, having never even put your skates on, and we'll get you skating forwards, stopping, and turning. This gives you the grounding in the basic skills that we'll progress over the following weeks. It will be 1.5 hours long as we have a fair bit to cover properly.
The second and third lessons take place at 7pm on Tuesday 9th June and Tuesday 16th June, when we'll get you skating more efficiently and teaching you some better turns. We will also be introducing stopping down and skating up hills as these are the bits of skating that most beginners worry about and are key skills needed for completing a Sunday Stroll. These two sessions will each be 1 hour long.
These three lessons all take place at The Royal Albert Memorial.
The final lesson will take place on Sunday 28th June, at 2pm. This is the lesson where we will start dealing with rough surfaces, that you will find in abundance around London, and skating in a group. We'll be meeting at the start point of the Sunday Stroll (the Hyde Park corner end of Serpentine Road) where we will watch the Sunday Stroll leave, so that you can see what you're going to be experiencing, and then we'll be using South Carriage drive which willbe closed to traffic. The reason this lesson takes place here is because South Carriage drive is used by the marshals of the Sunday Stroll to ensure that skaters are capable of doing the skate: if you can skate on this road then you can pretty much skate on any street in London. This session is planned to be an hour long but we might hangaround to wait for the returning Sunday Stroll, just you can get to see what the atmosphere is like when it's all over!
All of the lessons are going to be pretty intensive and so you should try to practice between them. By practising between lessons, even just once, you keep your skill level up and will find the following sessions slightly easier. If you don't practice your abilities drop over time and can hamper your learning curve.
For this course to run we need to get 6 people to sign up and, if that doesn't happen, we'll delay the start of the course by one week. Should the weather prevent a lesson from happening it will roll over to the following week.
Each of these lessons costs just £15, making for a total course cost of £60. You need only pay for those lessons you attend, not the entire £60 up front.
To book yourself on this course please contact Mark on 07753 489 669, fill in our booking form. Please include your mobile telephone number if you are seriously interested so that we can contact you if the weather gets in the way.
Whilst this course does not include actually going on a Sunday Stroll, we can arrange for an instructor to skate with you on your first attempt. Obviously the Sunday Stroll is, as with all of the street skates in London, FREE but it will cost just £40 to have the instructor with you for the whole 2 hour skate. They can be there to give you encouragement and advice during the skate.