Manchester’s rollerblading community has grown dramatically since the start of the COVID pandemic in 2020, from virtually non-existent to over 300 strong.
Fuelled by a desire to connect during a time of extreme isolation, many of the city’s youngsters began picking up a sport that had been in the shadows for nearly two decades.
Joe Bazli, a prominent member of the skating community, started posting his solo sessions on Instagram and saw a raft of fellow skaters reach to get involved.
He said: “People that I’d worked with or [that] I’d been mates with would see it and be ‘oh yeah I used to skate.’
“Essentially over that period it went from 10 [or]15 people in Manchester, that I knew of, to loads of skaters just popping up.”
Some two years later the popularity of rollerblading, a sport which reached mass appeal in the 1990s, shows no sign of slowing down.
Read the full story of the skaters driving the resurgence in the city below –
https://schoolofjournalism.shorthandstories.com/manchester-s-rollerblading-renaissance/index.html
