“Imagine if you could build a city like we’re building DIYs. Obviously, it would be quite chaotic, but it would just be such a beautiful landscape!”

Edward ‚Ted‘ Meyer Sonin grew up skating London’s historic Meanwhile Gardens skatepark. He was never a “smart” kid, as he says about himself. Yet, he somehow managed to enter Cambridge University. All throughout his studies, skateboarding has not only helped him keep his sanity, but it also led him to carve out his own niche within the academic field of urban geography. For his undergraduate thesis, titled ‚Fairytale Urbanism‘, he researched the nonlinear architectural dynamics, urban narrativity and cultural politics of Wonderland DIY in the Freetown of Christiana. Among others, he got to speak with the Wonderland wunderkind himself, Jonas Bünger, better known as Ginger. While Ted’s currently preparing his MPhil project on the city of Cambridge’s very own DIY-skate-culture, he still managed to find some time to share the following interview with us – an excerpt from one of his conversations with Ginger in October 2023, the story of Wonderland DIY told by one of its many main characters.

It’s quite a purist DIY in a very authentic form. Any insane stories behind some of the builds?

The day the loop was built was probably one of the most crazy things I’ve seen. I was with these two American skaters who had just came from a competition in Sweden, Joey Martin who now works for a big concrete firm in the US and Nick Pederson who shreds Burnside. The moment we stepped into Christiania, Albert came running. He knew they were both really good at working with concrete and he’d just found this stairwell at the recycling station and he’d desperately wanted to build a loop for a while. So instantly, they set the stair-rail up in front of the door to Wonderland and just concreted over it. You pretty much had to walk through the loop to get into the park at the time. But it was built and positioned so badly we had to take it all out and start completely from scratch again. I never believed the loop would actually happen, just straight-up DIY really.

I can’t imagine many people have been able to skate that thing. But most of Wonderland is pretty gnarly to skate anyways.

It’s funny, Wonderland is inspired by this park in the US called Happyland. If you look that place up, you can see why Wonderland’s design went so crazy and is how it is today.

It seems that Christiania and its culture has changed quite a lot since 1998 in a way that’s impeded the DIY culture, causing some tension and conflict between the skaters and Christiania.

It’s kind of weird, but now we have to implement these 10pm curfews for Wonderland because of what’s happened to Christiania. We still have Fridays though which is sacred to the community, kind of our party day. For me though, Wonderland is the only part of the original Christiania that’s left. If you don’t have any money you can’t get anything in Christiania anymore, but you can come to Wonderland and it functions as this place of help. The soul benefit is the wealth of freedom you have in here that you don’t really have out there in Christiania anymore, a place we all feel a co-ownership of. Whatever you want to build, you can do it here and we will help you. Apart from the golden rule that you don’t touch the bowl, everything else is fair game to be re-built, re-assembled or whatever. That’s something you can’t do anywhere else in Christiania anymore. Even with the art and sculptures we installed out in the front of the park, we were told that they had to get taken down straight away!

Because of the local building laws or why?

Because we didn’t ask for permission. There’s these funny rules in Christiania that if you want to build something, you need to put it up for discussion in your local area meeting for everyone to agree on it. Even if you wanted to build yourself a new kitchen in your own house, you can’t do it without everyone agreeing on it. That’s why when Albert built the ALIS shop next door, he did it in one weekend and paid for everything himself, because he would have never gotten the permission to. Wonderland has always been about ‚asking for forgiveness instead of permission‘ and there was only so many times we could get away with that. So there was actually a period when Christiania enforced this building curfew on the skaters, where we couldn’t build any more concrete without permission or “something bad” would happen. They were pretty mad at us, but as you know the concrete is all still there. But it was during that period of conflict and tension that Hullet DIY came about. The skaters had to find another place to keep building. There’s some crazy stories to its creation, like 20 skaters all there for 6 months, digging this massive hole in the ground. At the time, Fallaedpark was being built and people started taking wood and rebar from the construction site and bringing it down the road to build what’s now Hullet DIY. So in the end, the building curfew in Christiania wasn’t just an entirely bad thing, because now we have Hullet. There’s this saying at Wonderland: From shit comes good!

There’s such a rich narrative to Wonderland. The walls basically function as this ad-hoc exhibition in themselves, all the old boards, graphics and skate paraphernalia dotted around.

Still to this day I’m looking around when I’m there and I spot stuff on the walls I hadn’t noticed before and hear new stories about Wonderland. Like Rune Gilfberg and Nicky Guerro used to skate here and their old boards are still up on the wall. There’s all the stories about Tom Penny in Wonderland and just so many iconic skaters have been here. It’s pretty much a living museum of skate history. If you spend a whole day here in the summertime, there’s often these guided tours of Christiania and even they come inside Wonderland. So, it’s a really hard task to write the history of Wonderland, because there’s all these endless stories and characters you’ll need to uncover. And there’s all these different things now, that are connected to the place: Hullet DIY of course, WonderConcrete (a firm that builds skateparks across Denmark) and then there’s the Make Life Skate Life project. Albert’s a part of it and they’ve built skateparks all across the world in places like Nepal, Pakistan and Morocco. At one point, there was even a replica of Wonderland built in Osaka, Japan.

What do you see for the next 25 years of Wonderland?

Well, recently it’s been tough for Wonderland, and not even just the whole ALIS situation. First was what happened around COVID. Before the pandemic, there was already this feeling that some of the locals were disappearing and had found other purposes, so when COVID hit it was a sad time for Wonderland. Christiania closed down and we weren’t allowed to skate the park, so even more people began to disappear. This idea of Wonderland ‚locals‘ is less of a thing these days, as the community is getting somewhat smaller. And that’s alongside all the issues in Christiania with Pusher Street. For almost all the time I’ve been here, Christiania has always been about peace, love and unity, but some years back before COVID, the gangs here started to get violent. For the first five years that I was here, I never head anything about a single death – maybe a fight now and then, but never anything else. Now it’s a completely different situation. For the last five years we’ve lost someone every year in Christiania. The most recent was someone two years younger than me, a guy from Christiania with no gang relations at all, just in the wrong place at the wrong time. So at the moment it’s pretty fucked up. We want the gangs out, but Christiania is the guy being bullied in the corner and they are the ones with guns. So it’s a tough period right now, but hopefully Christiania will stand stronger on the other side. Not many DIY’s get to exist even for this long, but Wonderland will outlive Pusher Street! *As of now, over a year later on from this initial conversation, Pusher Street is gone.