James Newrick - Building A UK Street Foundation

There wasn't an abundance of quick hit internet videos out there, especially for a style of riding that was so niche at the time, so whatever videos you had would be played over and over again until they were burned into your memory. For me, NSF 2 was one of those videos. As previously mentioned, this was my introduction to the NSF scene, and I was personally very influenced by what they were doing. I felt that the Southern street riding scene was predominantly bland and uninteresting to me at that time, and the way that the NSF were riding and setting up their bikes really appealed to me. They just had an edge to them which I found really refreshing. NSF were at this point known as a fairly infamous group of people. Known troublemakers who travelled in large groups from a part of the country that soft Southerners like myself had never even been far enough North to see. NSF 2 was a glimpse into that world, and once we got a hold of this video it quickly became a pre-ride staple. Newrick's section was the one that was played the most in these instances - in fact I would still put it in my top ten most watched video sections, some thirteen years later.

A few things to note when watching this are that riding brakeless wasn't something that everyone did. Newrick and that whole Newcastle scene was definitely somewhere near the forefront of that whole movement. A lot of the tricks he does in the section are still considered hard today. You didn't see tricks like hardway 360s and bunny hop whips, or manual 180s without huge carving arcs leading up to them. In fact the whole video contained a lot of riding that was considered extremely technical and in a lot of cases very different to what most other pockets of riders in the country were doing. This really was a documentation of really progressive street riding at that time, and I think that many would agree that Newrick's unique approach to riding and video production laid down a lot of foundations for the direction of street riding in the UK for years to come. - JC