King Kong 2010

The 24th of July, the beautifully sun-soaked Saturday just gone, saw the urban culture & skate event; King Apparel King Kong 2010 take over Southsea Skatepark.

Aimed at celebrating & encouraging the creative sides of urban culture, it certainly did that. The ‘Street Art Doodle Wall’ was well and truly covered in a bit of everyone’s creative (and messy) spark, shout out to all the artists down on the day who had some great freestyle pieces going down, stuART, Mr. Kemp, Leila, Bryan & Joe. Also our arty sponsors Graphotism & Ironlak (well worth checking out if your into that kind of thing).

Plenty of fat beats boomed out across the park and common around it thanks to DJ Mos, Kenny, Random Scarves & the Durty Sound System DJs, a beastly selection of dirty dubstep, DnB, hip hop & alternative funk kept everyone’s tastes more than satisfied, sound track to the day couldn’t have been better.

Anyone unlucky enough to not make it down missed out on some hot as hell discounts on some of the freshest threads about, as the King Apparel team were down in force with a stall showcasing their selection of fine garments and not to forget the crafty locals Individual Threads.

Last but not least the key part of this year’s event; The Herbal Skateboards Mini-Ramp Jam was SICK.
Contest format was a minute each, going into a final 5 skaters with 2 minute runs. It was a heated battle and off the chain tricks were going down left, right & centre, but in the end the victors looked a little something like this:
In 1st Adam Keys, 2nd Noddy Rands & 3rd Bob Grist. All well deserving winners, with plenty of King Apparel, Herbal SBs, LovenSkate & Vans products as prizes. Again well done guys!

This was followed by a best trick contest and Casey Brown took top honours with the smith to kickflip out that he had nailed pre-contest…so sick. Some King Apparel T-shirts and a Herbal skateboard found their way into Casey’s mitts.

Thanks goes out to the Herbal crew who ran the jam, Strong Island’s Paul Gonella who kindly came down to help judge the contest, SUSO Drinks who kept everyone from going thirsty on a very hot day and everyone at Southsea Skatepark for helping making the event happen.

Writeup by Nick Stokes.
Video by Herbal Skateboards.

Are there 22 Skateparks in & around Portsmouth?

Bored manager and friend Tom has a cracking little Photo Diary Blog, we’ve mentioned it before on Strong Island and today it deserves another mention. Guest appearance by the one and only Punk Paul.

PRIMARY – Extended & Improved

We have some great news about our PRIMARY phonography exhibition (find out all the details here) that we can now announce:

- The deadline for submissions has now been extended to Sunday 4th March. We have had some incredible submissions but want to set aside more time to make the exhibition something really special.

- The competition is now open to up to 10 submissions from each individual. With the ability to capture many photos on your phone over the next two months we we want you to not feel restricted to just three. The same rules apply about the photos conforming to compositions using the primary colours though. If you have already submitted feel free to send more photos over as and when you please.

- The exhibition will be hosted by Albert Road’s own Bonzo Studio who are also partnering up with us in the creation of the exhibition space. More news on this soon!

- Finally, we will be running a competition as part of the exhibition where the best three photos submitted will win some incredible prizes. We will be announcing the prizes available very soon but got to say, these will be the best prize haul we have ever offered.

- We will be putting together a poster for the exhibition that will be on sale on the opening night. The poster will feature some of the best submissions and all profits from the sales will go to a local charity (details to follow soon). Due to this we need to say that any photos submitted to PRIMARY will involve you giving us permission to use them for commercial purposes, if you do not want your photo used in this way simply let us know via email.

Well, that is it for now! We really hope to drum up as much coverage locally for PRIMARY in the next couple of months so if you could Facebook/Tweet/+1 about the exhibition we would really appreciate it. We would love this exhibition to be a real reflection of the whole population of Portsmouth with everyone taking part and feeling involved.

It’s going to be a Strong Movember – Closed at £725

Righto chaps, it’s time to clean shave your boat race and get that mighty moustache on the grow in support of Movember for The Prostate Cancer Charity and the Institute of Cancer Research. For 30 days of November you can help support and raise awareness through selflessly parading your top lip for charity.

You can sign up yourself, as I’m sure many of you already have, or you can join the Strong Island team and seek out sponsorship as a team. Through the Strong Island Movember page you can ask people to join the group, make donations, upload photos and post updates via the MoSpace page, Facebook and Twitter.

Head over to www.mobro.co/StrongIsland if you would like to get involved and grow a Strong Moustache to help raise awareness, or simply head over to www.uk.movember.com and sign up to personally raise money.

The funds raised in the UK support the number one and two male specific cancers – prostate and testicular cancer. The funds raised are directed to programmes run directly by Movember and our men’s health partners, The Prostate Cancer Charity and the Institute of Cancer Research. Together, these channels work together to ensure that Movember funds are supporting a broad range of innovative, world-class programmes in line with our strategic goals in the areas of awareness and education, survivorship and research.

Poster: Tristan Savage