Official: skaters welcome on South Bank

To more conservative South Bank culture lovers, they are a frightening, unpredictable menace barely more tolerable than aggressive street drinkers.

For many others, however, the skateboarders who hone their skills at the biggest arts complex in Europe are some of the most breathtakingly creative and athletic performers on show.

Skaters have flocked to the South Bank ever since they realised that the gloomy concrete area beneath Queen Elizabeth Hall is one of the best places to skate in Britain, thanks to its protection from the elements and amphitheatre of flat banks and smooth surfaces.

The authorities, however, have always actively discouraged them after elderly visitors to the centre complained about the noise of wheels on cement, not to mention the succession of near-collisions with speeding skaters.

Now, however, the South Bank Centre believes the skateboarders of Queen Elizabeth Hall are artists in their own right - and has embraced them.

This weekend, for the first time, the South Bank has begun helping these urban athletes.

Recently appointed chief executive Michael Lynch has commissioned five new works of street furniture that skaters and pedestrians alike will be able to use.

Mr Lynch, who used to have a skateboard himself in his younger days, said: "We are trying to give access to what seems to be almost ancestral ground for skateboarders."

Launched alongside an exhibition of skater art, the designs are the creation of collective The Side Effects Of Urethane. Founder Rich Holland, who has been skating at the South Bank since he was 12, said: "The skaters have always been here: whether they are welcome or not, it's always been their space.

"If we weren't here, the homeless people would probably return and it would become a place where you feel like you are going to get mugged. Most people have always been really pleased to see skaters here. Maybe pedestrians find us inconvenient because it seems like we are in the way - but now they are channelled around the skate area, and anyway we can control where we are going."

Over the years security guards and sometimes even police have attempted to send the skaters packing. In the Nineties some of the banks were even fitted with obstacles to make them impossible to skate.

Mike McCart, commercial director of the South Bank Centre, said: "A lot of people enjoy watching the skateboarders and the tricks they perform. They have found a very good use for a space we had not been able to find a use for, and we are very happy for them to use that location."