Nefarious Skate Crew

Nefarious Skate Crew, otherwise known as the ‘Pizza Appreciation Society’, is a group of fifteen women based in London that are interested in four things; pizza, beer, hangs and skateboarding.

“The Pizza Appreciation Society”

The group was born in early 2016 when the founders met at the Bay Sixty6 skatepark, a mecca for London’s female skate scene. Bonded by their love of skating, they created Nefarious – an all female, all-radical group that’s open to any level of female skater.

Nefarious is a group that makes a point of being socially aware and breaking down social barriers. Whether it be tackling prize money for female comps, or making other women feel more comfortable stepping on to the skate park for the first time, these women are on it (between skates and pizza dates obviously.)

3) Brujas

Taking their name from the 1986 cult skate film The Skate Witches, this feminist female collective from the Bronx stand for a mix of strong spiritual feminity, intersectional feminism and hard punk values.

Arianna Gil co-founded the group after discovering the depth of the inherent misogyny within skateboarding, while teaching female skate classes in Ohio. On moving back to New York, Gil, along with some friends from the East Village, started Brujas as a female skate collective to go alongside Casino, the entirely male skateboarding group that existed in the city at the time.

“A mix of strong, spiritual feminity, intersectional feminism and hard punk values”

After a Tumblr post of the Brujas went viral, the group found a huge increase of New York’s women searching them out to join their park rides and jam sessions. Looking for a way to take advantage of and grow this suddenly powerful female movement, the founders started Caribbean queer parties called Sucias all around the city.

Now the group is looking to find a space of their own to skate, but don’t intend to separate themselves from their male skateboarder pals completely in the process. “It would be really tight to have one day a week that’s just girls only, though,” Gil explained in a recent interview, “just so we could feel what it’s like for [the guys] for one day.”

4) Longboard Girls Skate Crew

Longboard Girls Crew (LGC) is less of a local female crew and more of a movement. The community, originally founded in Madrid in 2010 to attract more women to the sport of longboarding, has gone supernova and is now the biggest longboard community on the planet.

What is pretty rad about this collective is that as a video based community, not only does their content only feature female skaters, it’s  also entirely produced by women, creating even more female opportunities in other male dominated industries during the process.

Longboard Girls Crew is acknowledged in 180 countries, with official crews and ambassadors in more than 70 of those locations. From the look of their video channels, which continue to grow at an ever increasing rate, this crew shows no sings of slowing down and may, one day in the future, take over the world.

6) The Very Old Skateboarders

Unless you’ve been living under a rock, you’ve probably already heard of this awesome group. Set up by three women in their sixties, Very Old Skateboarders is a collective of over 1,000 people who picked up a board later in their life than your average skateboarder.

The group organise huge skate sessions around London, usually hitting up Southbank Skatepark, bringing up the age of the usually teenage crowd and showing the youth what they’ve got to offer. From seasoned pros to complete beginners, the only requirement to join this group is a board and willingness for new experiences.

Photographs of the group are currently being showcased at the OXO Tower in London and the group are heading down on Saturday, 10th February to meet up and have a weekend skate. Are you a London local in search of other skaters? Head along to the tower this weekend for 9am.