Arches DIY: The story of Glasgow's DIY skatepark

Just north of Glasgow City Centre is a roofless relic of a building that's become home to dozens and dozens of skate ramps and obstacles. This is the Arches DIY, a grassroots, concrete paradise built by local skaters and community members. Nestled on Sawmill Road, the ‘ground floor’ skatepark, technical and gnarly, is connected by a man-made hill to the first floor observation deck – if you will – with a graffiti wall, fire pit, pissing bushes, and beautiful views of the city. The Arches is more than just a skatepark: it’s a secret hiding place where skaters, and anyone else who wants to join, can gather and break free from everyday surveillance. 

I sit down and chat with C*, one of a few skaters who started the Arches DIY. I ask C if he knows what the site was before it became the Arches. “There’s been several phases of dilapidation – the site of the Arches was originally a sawmill, hence the name Sawmill Road,” he explains.  “When the sawmill fell apart, the site then became a building called the Cleansing Department where road workers and cleaners brought refuse back from the streets and public bathrooms.

“The site was later taken over by a cohort of artists who created murals and sculptures there. They built the hill as part of a Stolen Spaces programme to create access to the upper level of the building. It was also them that built the gates. Now it’s the Arches,” says C. “We called it the Arches because of the building’s Victorian, brick, arched windows. Plus, when you’re building ramps, everything’s an arch in one way or another – a radius, a diameter, a curve – the arches are everywhere.” 

When the site of the Arches was discovered, it was not an obvious site for a skatepark, to say the least. “I discovered the space when I was doing a course about reimagining public spaces. When we found the Arches it was a total mess; you couldn’t even see there was concrete on the floor,” he says. “It was just debris, rotten wooden boards that had stacked up and rotted, overgrown weeds, needles.” 

But from weeds and waste there was potential for a concrete wonderland, it just took a skater’s eye. “Underneath all the shit that was there, I could just see that it was a special place,” says C. For him, it had the same feeling of privacy as the old Bristo Square in Edinburgh – a very special, but now demolished, Scottish skate spot – because of its enclosed nature. “The ground was rough, but it was sheltered from the wind and there was lots of rubble and building material already there.”

Carrying on its Cleansing Department legacy, discarded items and waste at the site are used to fill the ramps before being covered in concrete. Fittingly, they’ve built the space using a fair few weird found objects over the years. “There’s definitely a couple of Nextbikes, a trolley, and a fridge in the ramp in the corner,” says C.

Pic: Arches DIY.

But whose land is this that the Arches is being built on? C explains: “The land is privately owned. The people who own it want to demolish it. They’re quite detached from the land. I think they live in a different city in the world, and for them, it’s maybe more of a figure than a thing.” 

Urban spaces are extremely policed: there are noise limits, structures designed to stop sleeping and skateboarding, to restrict how we behave and interact with public space. At the Arches, communities can break free from this. They can participate in these surroundings because they’re involved in its construction. There’s a distinction between the land that is privately owned and the space that’s been created.

C is clear: “The principle of the Arches is I don’t own it, nobody does, and anybody can pretty much do what they want there. Design processes are open to participation and people use it very regularly of their own accord. People hold self-defense classes there, boy racers photograph their cars there, wedding pictures, kids' birthday parties.” The list goes on. C adds, “I laugh sometimes because I’ve turned up to this space that isn’t mine and then just started telling people it’s theirs.

“People really care about the space,” says C and it makes my heart warm. “I have a funny story, actually. One April Fool's Day, I said on Instagram, ‘Right, the bulldozers are here, they’re going to demolish the Arches,’ and we got hundreds and hundreds of messages: mothers literally telling us they were going to chain themselves and their children to the gates of the Arches to stop them taking the space.”

Skateboarding is so many things, but at its heart is a culture of camaraderie, which is clearly shown at the Arches DIY. Skateboarding has made the site of the Arches alive again – not just for skaters, but for everyone – as people build there like the sawyers did; transform waste like the cleaners did; create murals and sculptures like the artists did. That’s what you call skating up space.

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Support or get involved with the Arches DIY via their Instagram @arches_diy or email thearchesdiy@gmail.com
*Name has been changed to protect identity.