Harv Frost can’t remember when she got her first pair of skates – it might have been for Christmas or her birthday. But she does remember the freedom she felt as she glided along the seafront in Brighton, UK, for the first time. It was during the Covid-19 lockdown in 2020 and the filmmaker had recently come out as Trans, presenting herself as femme for the first time. “Roller skates became my suit of armour,” she says. “I was so focused on looking good on skates that it diminished the anxiety around going out and presenting as something that people might find challenging.”
She joined thousands of new skaters, who took up the sport during a period when exercise was one of the only reasons to be outside, and soon improved. There’s a quicker rate of progression with roller skating, Harv says, because you’re literally strapped in: “You’ll go down if you don’t figure it out, so there’s an element of fight or flight.” As she honed the skill, weaving in and out of people along the boardwalk, she noticed they were remarking not on her gender but on how graceful she looked on her skates, and, she surmised, how much they wanted to do it too.
In the past few years, roller skating has taken off across the world, fuelled by TikTok – where there more than 196 million videos about the sport – and popular skaters including Harv, London-based Dev ‘The StreetSurfer’, and Oumi Janta in Berlin who are making it cool again. New rinks have opened, such as New York’s Xanadu, while the festival Skate Love Barcelona welcomes 2,000 visitors each September. Pop culture has taken notice, too: Harv recently filmed with the K-pop group Le Sserafim, skating in the music video for their song Eve, Psyche & The Bluebeard’s Wife.
For south Londoner DeVanté Walters, roller skating is much more than a hobby. What started out as a joke among friends back in high school has become a 12-year-long obsession. He now creates skating content for social media full-time, which has allowed him to quit his job at a bank. “The easy perception of skating is very much disco, Afro, like ’70s flared jeans. But I think especially with our London style, we’ve given it a different picture,” he says. “It’s more urban, it’s more street, it’s more rugged.”
Dev is predominantly a speed skater, chopping in and out of traffic on the streets of London, but he’ll go to ‘jams’, which are more like parties, as well. In fact, roller skating is as much a sport as an art form – from artistic skating that resembles figure skating to jam skates that are like dances – while park skaters, mostly represented by the boldest in the women and queer scene, get a thrill from doing tricks to the beat of punk music and heavy metal.
Roller skating is deeply entwined with music. “It’s funny, because I could be skating so fast and doing the most dangerous stuff and have the slowest playlist ever,” Dev explains. “You’d look at me and think, ‘He’s listening to some crazy rap drill’ and genuinely, I’m listening to Brent Faiyaz.” But when he’s up for a party, he heads to meetups at rinks such as Flippers or Rollernation, and more informal set-ups in parks, where his favourite skate DJs play: people including Onyx.ToBeHonest and Dom Diego, who are skaters themselves and know how to match the bpm.
“When you really trace back the roots of skating, it’s heavily embedded in Black history, especially in America,” says Dev. In fact, the sport became a vehicle for the Civil Rights Movement – with rinks playing host to ‘skate ins’ and protests throughout the mid-20th century. “Roller skating was encouraged among veterans to manage their PTSD after World War II, but there was a lot of segregation,” Jocelyn Marie Goode, skate pop-up event organiser and founder of the African-American Roller-Skate Museum in New York. “Rinks were one of the first places you saw protests taking place.”
In the Victorian era, roller skating was a way to break gender norms and clothing restrictions – departing from the formality of the time, women began to wear tighter dresses for convenience. Later, roller derbies, which began in 1935, were a way to show speed, power and creativity. By the ’70s, the sport was being compared to wrestling on wheels, complete with extravagant, glittery costumes, face paint and wild stage names; and in the ’90s, it was adopted by third-wave feminists as their own.
Whether for speed, strength or artistry, roller skating has captured hearts around the world. “There’s something so liberating about just absolutely caning it down a street, mixing in little dance moves, and listening to your music,” says Harv. “When I’ve got my headphones on and I’m on my roller skates, I genuinely feel indestructible. It feels like [being] a superhero.”
Emma Russell is a writer and editor based in London, covering music, art and youth culture for titles including i-D, the Guardian, The Financial Times and VICE
