22/04/2026
Today's letter begins outside the Trocadero on Great Windmill Street, which is now a half-empty entertainment complex near Piccadilly Circus. It doesn't look like the birthplace of anything. But on the 22nd of April 1823, when this building was still a high-ceilinged tennis court turned public exhibition space, a fruit seller from Piccadilly named Robert John Tyers arrived with something strapped to his boots and demonstrated it to whoever cared to watch. He called it the Volito. From the Latin: to fly. Five wheels in a line, the centre one largest, with metal brake hooks front and back. The first wheeled skate that could go forward, turn, and stop. Tyers had watched the Thames freeze for the last time in 1814, and the great Frost Fairs disappear with it. He had seen the city's replacement rink fail spectacularly, its artificial ice made from hog's lard and salts turning away everyone who tried it. He did not need ice. He needed wheels. The tennis court became a circus ring, then a music hall, then a restaurant, then the Trocadero. But for one spring morning in 1823, it was the place where roller skating began. Today's letter follows the whole trail, from that demonstration to the Rollerblade of 1987, which used five wheels in a line just as Tyers had drawn them.
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