It began around midnight on Tooting Common. Ten or fifteen roller skaters rolled past with neon lights and music, cutting shapes through the dark, and were gone. It took weeks of asking around to find where they had come from: a Sainsbury's basement car park in Vauxhall, Friday night, late. I got there early to an empty floor and almost went home. Then they arrived, one by one, curving down the ramp, a lap to warm up, greeting familiar faces before getting stuck in. By half ten the basement was a hundred people deep. Wheels humming on concrete under low ceilings. Garage, funk and hip hop coming from every direction and somehow agreeing. Skaters threading through pillars and parked cars, breaking into groups and folding back into one long line, snaking backwards in single file. Nobody calls it. They just know. I followed the scene for three years, through every season. Winter drives it underground into car parks, sheltered and echoing, gritty with tyre tracks and trolleys. Summer lets it out across the city: the Emirates concourse circled like a velodrome until the floodlights kick in, a rectangle of concrete at Greenwich with the sun dropping behind Canary Wharf and the light coming back off the water. People cross the whole of London to be there, which tells you most of what you need to know about what they get back. It grew after lockdown, when London went outside looking for freedom and found it on eight wheels. What holds it together is the people. Sixty-year-olds and teenagers skate shoulder to shoulder. Beginners get taught by whoever is nearest. An older skater checks in on a younger one she has not seen in a few weeks. This is a community in the purest sense of the word. A place to belong on a night when belonging is thin elsewhere, open in a way that quietly contradicts how groups gathering in public are usually read. Style carries everything: glitter, coloured wheels and laces, clip-on lights. People are known by how they move as much as how they look. Nobody funded it and nobody manufactured it, which is exactly why it works. The project morphed into a 96-page printed zine, a collaboration in craft with art director Paul Rider and writer Dan Parker. We built a custom typeface from the skating itself, coating skaters' wheels in ink and rolling them over a printed alphabet, so the people in the photographs helped make the object they appear in.