Machin agrees: “It’s much more character-led, there are personal journeys through the play, so that it’s not a series of snapshots or images, which might make it more of a documentary, it is a drama.”Yet the pounding mechanical presence of reality will, unavoidably, interrupt the drama from time to time, if only to prevent the actors from being upstaged. Machin admits that some of the original material had to be carved away simply to create the space to play with what he calls “the toys” – the trains, lorries, crane and ship: “With the best will in the world, even if an actor is delivering the most wonderful story about growing up in Hotwells, if there’s a steam train going past behind him, nobody’s going to be interested in Hotwells.”It is likely that, for all their hopes of boosting Bristol’s civic pride, Machin and Smith’s greatest gift to the people of Bristol will be an enduring memory of the scene of which production manager Derek Simpson – the man responsible for the practicalities on the night – is already dreaming: “The curtains go back, and there’s the ship sitting in the harbour ready to do her turn. Fantastic.” Up the Feeder, Down the ‘Mouth and Back Again will be performed at Princes Wharf, Bristol from 28 June to 8 July Box office (0117) 987 7877. The phallic towers of transnational capitalism that bestride city centres seem imperturbable, but at ground level they are subject to conquest. Skateboarders, moving unbidden through these public spaces, can display an incredible virtuosity, moving with such freedom from the Newtonian norms that they might be holograms.

Their movement changes our vision of body, space and place.Skateboarding has been around since the 1930s, but it first became popular in California in the late 1950s as a form of urban surfing. Skaters soon tired of the smooth streets and looked for more challenging surfaces, such as dry swimming pools and drainage ditches. By the 1970s there were purpose-built “skate parks” using designs based on pools and drainage pipes. It seemed as if skateboarding had found its “pitch”.
In the 1980s, this first attempt to contain skaters failed. They returned to the streets with a fiercer sense of conquest, propelled by all the supporting apparatus of a mature subculture. Anarchic prose in the fanzines written by skaters poured out slogans about “localising” the streets.

“Skate punk” bands such as Bad Religion acted as the equivalent of 1960s surf rock (and helped to preserve punk as a vital form among American suburban youth).The politics of this subculture are familiar enough: an adolescent rejection of family values, of formal schooling and of the rest of the package that takes most of us from youth to maturity. In recent times, most skaters have expressed resistance to their activity becoming an Olympic “demonstration sport”, or even to calling skateboarding an “extreme sport”.Though there are professionals and competitions, on the whole skaters disregard competitiveness. They just want to show off – their skill, and their hardness and eagerness to take risks. In such a male-dominated activity this is badged as risk-taking masculinity, with the predictable downside of routine homophobia and misogyny expressed in the fanzines.Borden does not confine his skaters to the margins of subcultural studies. He is an architectural historian, and skateboarders help us to think about buildings and their use.

A handrail, a park bench, a sweeping curve of concrete: all can become the architectural heart of an area for these four-wheeled temporary graffitists. Borden argues that they draw our attention to the city as the site of perpetual change, to everyday life as the location of politics and to the body as the potential site of resistance to the routine acts through which most of us, unthinkingly, inhabit urban space.Skateboarders perform a critique of urban architecture’s everyday use. For the skater, space is not imposed by the architect or planner; it comes out from the body, centrifugally.Flowing images from video clips and, in particular, a number of blurred double-exposure images that superimpose the skater on the architecture circulate widely within the fan culture through magazines and the internet. They record the ways in which the spaces of power can become – temporarily – places of free expression.Which means that skateboarders are often seen as a public nuisance. Those 1970s skate parks were an attempt to get them off the streets, and architects have hit back by placing intrusive uprights on benches, or roughening the surfaces of concrete aprons. Local and national authorities have banned the activity (skateboarding was illegal in Norway for many years).Capitalism, meanwhile, has predictably managed to come to terms with skateboarding by selling clothing and equipment as commodities – Airwalk shoes, for example – which make a more permanent impression on urban space.However, Borden doesn’t leave the last word with the commodity, and neither should we. The skater provides a critique of commodity capitalism and its spaces.