A few years ago, skater Tom Day moved to the English countryside; a three-acre field in the Fenlands of Lincolnshire. It’s quite flat and is surrounded by farmland. There’s a 32-foot long static caravan that he's spent the last two years renovating and making a bit more liveable, and he's got a few sheds and barns, a chicken house and a chicken coop with probably about a dozen chickens and ducks. He's also been building ramps outside the caravan.
He was given about 100 concrete slabs over time and has been laying them to create something quite low-impact, small and fun with a more real street feel, using materials that would make a good noise and feel good when skating them. In the new short film Land, by Jim Craven, Tom skates the rural Fenlands, trekking everywhere to find these semi-mythical spots in the middle of nowhere.
"Once we started trying to locate a few of those, we discovered that pretty much everyone knows about one sick rural spot – every time the topic was brought up in conversation, there would be a new nugget of information or a little clue as to where something was," says Tom. "Then we’d have to come home and spend six hours clicking around on Google Maps to track something down. I also started digging around on all these forums. It’s called ‘draining’ – ditches for draining overspills of reservoirs and stuff. If you look on these forums, you have all these dudes who go wandering through big, really fucking long drainage systems and they take pictures the whole way. It’s just like a spot book."
Watch Land featuring Zach Riley and Joe O'Donnell below. Filmed and edited by Jim Craven. Logos by Pip Seagrave.
