Abstract
This article proposes the concept of ‘new-traditional skateboarding’ through an autoethnographic account of a skate session at Southbank, London — one of the world’s most symbolically laden skate spots. Drawing on Southbank’s contested history, the article traces how a convergence of factors during the Social Skate Summit (2026) produced a moment in which non-traditional skateboarders visibly dominated a peak-time session at a traditionally exclusionary site. Foregrounding the reclamatory groundwork of the London Skate Mums and skate photographer Norma Ibarra — whose lens brings the value-creating mechanisms of traditional skate media into non-traditional spaces — this article argues that a layering of permissive space, diverse community, and traditional ritual with non-traditional conviviality generated something qualitatively new: not a neutralization of skateboarding’s critical edge, but an expansion of who gets to embody it. New-traditional skateboarding is offered as a reparative framework through which a tradition of exclusion becomes, however partially, a tradition of inclusion.