Source Park
“My dad used to play golf; he never expected to know about BMX, which shocked him. So we get parents coming here; their kids are at football one day, and they are doing BMX or skateboard lessons. Some people are surprised that you can do lessons. The parents head out to The Courtyard for a latte or an IPA, and everyone’s happy. Many kids that ride here, their parents, at some point, have ridden a BMX or skated. It’s been around long enough that it’s not new. It’s in the Olympics on TV and the mainstream newspaper.”
Rich Moore SourceBMX + Source Park. Jordan O’kane on the BMX; Kaitlyn Massey is skating.
Did you grow up in the South East? And is that where you found a love for BMX?
Rich. Our family home where I grew up is next to the Bexhill BMX track; our mum still lives there. So when I was around six, a school friend was racing BMX; I nagged to go along, and my first race was soon after that. Then my brother Marc, who was three at the time, and he got into it a few months later. So within a year, we badgered our parents to take us to regional races and pretty quickly, we spent every day down at the BMX track jumping or riding with friends. So it becomes a bit of a lifestyle where you ride for fun with your social group.
As kids, that’s kind of what we did. We went to school, the beach, and the BMX track; that was our life. Some of my best friends are still the kids I rode with back at the start.
We went to regional and national races, competing in the national circuit, British, European and world championships. As teenagers, we went to every world championship. Marc was world number three at one point; I was making top 10 sometimes in the UK.
BMX was much smaller than it is now. So we would get to races or contests, and some of the best riders were there, and you’d get to hang out with them; it was close because it was such a small sport and culture.
I broke my leg when I was 15 at a race in Milton Keynes, so I was out for the year. So I borrowed my dad’s compact camera and then bought a little SLR and started shooting photos at races. That led me to do articles for magazines and test BMX products which funded my way through university.
When I went to uni, Marc taught BMX, riding at a high standard. He was testing products while I was shooting and writing about them. So we had this room full of products we had been testing. We knew all the suppliers by that point as well. So it made sense to open a little shop in Bexhill, as our local shop had closed. Marc was just 19, and I was 21. I was still in my last year at uni, so Marc opened the shop, and I helped him. When I graduated, I came back for the summer. I didn’t intend to work there, but I did. I met a web designer friend, so within the first year, we launched a website, and everything got bigger after that.
I was studying business; I thought I’d go to London, like all my friends and get a corporate job, but I moved back to this area. I’ve always loved living by the seaside. The shop was never going to be that big locally because the market is super niche; but that incentivised us to get more people in to BMX and Skating so that we are the scene and had more customers. But the website opened our eyes and helped us grow into a real business. The shop and the skate park wouldn’t exist without the website and vice versa, but the website is over 95% of our business these days.
“I was born in Hastings, grew up in Bexhill, and have lived in Hastings for the last 20 years. So I don’t think of them as separate places, really.”
What happened next after your first small shop?
Rich. So after the first shop and website, we moved to a larger shop because we didn’t have enough space. It was around the corner in Bexhill, and we were only there for a few years. We entered and won the 1066 Business Awards. We didn’t expect to win; it was crazy and raised our profile locally, enabling us to get a loan from HSBC. We immediately spent all that money on 1,600 pairs of half-price shoes, literally the whole loan. We didn’t have anywhere to put them, it was an insane amount of shoes, but they were half price. So we run advertising in magazines for half-price shoes, and people flocked to our website, and some shows where we sold the shoes from a van. That helped build our customer base up. We produced full-length videos and sponsored riders, filmed and constantly put DVDs out, which were free with orders. So we just grew the business organically.
By 2006, so many people were coming to us from Hastings, so we moved our shop from Bexhill to Hastings on Queens Road. We had a band playing on the roof to open it, which was pretty cool. However, it was probably a mistake as we outgrew the shop immediately because the website was growing so quickly. So within two years, we moved to a church next to Hastings Station, Trinity Hall on Braybrooke Terrace.
I lived in the Vicarage next door, and Marc lived there after the first year. We built ramps in there, which is why we wanted the place. We had our shop in one church hall and ramps in the other one. When we were fixing the roof, Marc figured out that you could build ramps off the top into the garden of the Vicarage. So the ramps came off the roof down by the railway track. We had some of the best riders in the world come to ride these sketchy as hell ramps. That was our turning point; we had this cool venue, and riders from America came to ride it. It was on the front covers of magazines; it was super photogenic because it was a church.
Jordan O’kane - Follow him on Instagram
“BMX and skating are creative; they have photography, video, fashion, music and travel elements that everyone’s protective of.”
Where did the name come from, and how did branding develop?
Rich. That is something we were always aware of working for magazines, making videos and making content. We wanted to build Source into a brand as a retailer. All our competitors were bike shops selling online where we wanted to be a brand.
We were sitting around the table; this was back when we still lived with our parents. Dad suggested Moore’s Bikes as Moore is our surname; we were like, no way. There weren’t many BMX shops around that only did BMX; a few were mainly bike shops that did a bit of BMX. We wanted it to be a brand, selling cool clothing and skateboards alongside bikes rather than a bike shop with an oily carpeted floor and rubbish everywhere. Marc came up with the name and first logo, I guess, the Source of things. I don’t know. He’s good with that stuff.
We both kind of fizzled out of racing; it was starting to change. In 2008 BMX racing got into the Olympics. So it became a bit more professional and less fun. Marc stopped competing professionally and focused on the shop.
Around 2013, I spoke with a local guy Cliff, who knew about the White Rock Baths on Hastings seafront. He had heard that the council wanted to do something with the building. I knew it because it was an ice skating rink when I was a kid, but people had forgotten about it because it was underground and had been derelict for 20 years. So I’d said to Marc it would make an awesome skate park. Then by chance,
Marc was speaking with somebody affiliated with the council in a pub, in the old town, about renting some space still related to Trinity Hall. So I said can you ask her about White Rock Baths? One thing led to another, and we ended up having a tour of the old baths. We thought the place was unbelievable and started planning the space in our minds. This will be the skate park, the Plaza; and this will be the shop. It was perfect for events because it has 360° degree viewing; the riders air out at the same height as spectators view them. So we knew it would make the best venue for events and as a skate park.
By the time we got speaking to the council, it was like 2014. So we let them know we wanted to take the place. We said if you can get the building into a shell, we’ll rent it off you on commercial terms. That might sound straightforward, but there was no electricity; it was leaking like a sieve and derelict. So getting it to a shell was a big deal and cost well over a million pounds. So we worked with the council to raise funds based on our business plan. In fairness, Hastings Council were awesome; most people there understood it after we had done a lot of pitches and presentations. Overall they were super supportive, and we found some real cheerleaders within the council for what we planned to do. They could see what we had achieved at the church on a small scale. And that we were already a successful working business. So we opened in February 2016.
“Everyone always wants to help each other in skating and BMX, there is a real etiquette and community around it, and it is not competitive.”
What was it like after transforming the building and seeing Source Park open up?
Rich. As soon as we saw this venue, we could see it as a place for a world-class BMX event, with hundreds of spectators. So we, even before we were ready to open, Vans, Monster Energy, Red Bull and businesses like that to come down to look at the place, they were all sold on the idea of sponsoring it. So in our first year, seven months after opening, September 2016, we hosted the first Battle of Hastings, and the world’s best riders came along. They trusted us, sponsors put prize money up, and the event was amazing, and it’s just gone from strength to strength. It is now an annual event; though we missed one year for COVID. We even did a smaller version last year. This September will be our sixth Battle of Hastings. It is now a week-long festival of BMX, and the annual BMX Awards have moved from Las Vegas to Hastings. So we went to it for 20 years running in Vegas, and now it has been in Hastings for the last four years. Tickets sell out in a few days; it’s all live streamed on YouTube. We rent a whole hotel opposite for a week. It is awesome; it has the best announcers, everyone banging on the side panels, and it feels gladiatorial.
Source Park and The Courtyard are underground on many different levels. It’s 200 meters long. It is 150 years old. We originally pitched this building as a phase one and two, so the period of COVID lockdowns allowed us to tackle phase two. So we ended up redeveloping and opening The Courtyard. So now we’ve got local businesses out there, like Brewing Brothers, a cool local pub that we’ve known for years, since they brewed beer for our events. We’ve turned it into five retail units, a restaurant, a bar, a juice bar and a coffee shop with a barber shop. Eating, drinking, and a social hub is part of the building. So for events, it’s great, but it’s a super cool place to hang-our year round.
And does Source have any other venues?
Rich. We have a warehouse in America in an old whiskey distillery in Louisville, Kentucky; it is our biggest market for us now. So we have these bourbon barrels and ramps made out of them, and we film a lot there and do some small contests. And then we did Battle of the Brands, an extension of Battle of Hastings. Where four teams, four brands we sell, go on a road trip somewhere in the world for a week, doing all these challenges. We create a magazine and content and videos out of it. So yeah, it’s kind of extended; and we have a warehouse in Germany too.
We also do outreach within the community with portable ramps to get people into BMXing and skateboarding. When we opened the skate park, we developed a coaching program where we trained coaches to teach BMX and skating, which wasn’t even a thing five years ago. We’ve seen riders come through from young kids. The best example is a guy called Little Stu, who hung out at the skate park. He was always amazing. He started coming here when he was, I guess, 13 or 14 when we first opened the church. He is now called Big Stu, to put it in perspective. He works here, coaches people, has sponsors, has qualified for Battle of Hastings three years running, and then last year he was a captain and got second. It was awesome! So it’s incredible to see local kids with natural talent develop.
There is a guy, Josh, that designs many of our bikes and does a lot of our purchasing. He’s worked for us for years, but he was our first ever customer in our Bexhill shop when he was 14.
We want to make the experience as easy as possible for people. Because when you walk into a massive skate park for the first time, it can be pretty intimidating. Everyone is moving fast and looks like they know what they’re doing. So we want to make it safe and take that intimidation away. So we have marshals here who can coach and help people get into it and direct them to get lessons, give them pointers or even equipment. We’re also rare as a skate park to have free spectating so people walking along the seafront can come in and look around the building, see some riding, grab a drink if they want, and feel welcome.
Follow Kaitlyn Massey on Instagram
“There are a lot of people that live in Hastings that don’t know how enormous Source Park is; that under their feet there is this giant subterranean complex of hundred odd rooms with all these different, weird things going on.”
Rich Moore.
Source Park
White Rock, Hastings TN34 1JL
Call. 01424 238360
www.sourcebmx.com/sourcepark
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