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Back in 2009, English skating was a snooze—all of the good skate gear was coming from America. That didn’t sit right with Lev Tanju. He was just another 20-something skater then, an employee of Slam City Skates, the legendary London shop that shared an address with Rough Trade records, and a fixture at the Southbank skate park, in the shadow of the Waterloo Bridge. Through those two institutions of English skating, Tanju met Gareth Skewis, a fellow skater who would later help to launch the successful but short-lived English skatewear brand Silas and become the co-owner of Slam. He also fell in with a crew of skaters living together in a South London flophouse affectionately known as the Palace. As Tanju found his place in this milieu, he became convinced that the London scene had something to offer the world that was more exciting than the same tired old stuff that had been coming out of Southern California for years. And he believed he was the person to deliver it. “I was just a skateboarder,” he says. “I knew I wanted a skate company. I liked clothes. I wanted to make a skateboard company without looking towards America for references. And to make nice clothes for myself to wear.”

At the time there weren’t many skate brands putting serious thought into their garments. Skate clothes were, for the most part, the kind of stuff that was being sold to kids at the mall. There was one company operating on the level that Tanju was imagining, of course, started by another Englishman by the name of James Jebbia. But Supreme represented New York. Why couldn’t Tanju do the same thing for London? Ever since Silas had ceased production, Tanju had been talking to Skewis about starting a new brand. But he didn’t have a name for the company or a place to begin. Then along came a couple of guys named Tim and Barry, the hosts of a YouTube channel called Don’t Watch That TV, which became the megaphone for the South London grime scene. They gave Tanju a show. By this time, the lads at the Palace flophouse had taken to calling themselves the Palace Wayward Boys Choir, and there he found the name for his program: The PWBC Weekly News. Every Wednesday at 4:20 p.m., Tanju would drop a new episode. It was a kind of skate news show, with overdubbed audio and a chaotic edit of skating and news clips, and it became the aesthetic foundation for what Palace would become.