Educated at
Magdalen College School, Oxford (MCS), Iain Borden graduated from
University of Newcastle upon Tyne in 1985, and went on to complete master's degrees at
UCL and
University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) and a PhD at
UCL. He is an Honorary Fellow of the
Royal Institute of British Architects, and a Principal Fellow of the
Higher Education Academy.), boundaries and surveillance, theorists Henri Lefebvre and Georg Simmel, film and architecture, gender and architecture, body spaces and the experience of city spaces (
The Unknown City: Contesting Architecture and Social Space, (
MIT Press, 2001)). Borden has also undertaken a history of automobile driving as a spatial experience of cities, landscapes and architecture, and particularly as represented on film:
Drive: Journeys through Film, Cities and Landscapes, (Reaktion, 2012). For many years Borden has been involved in skateboarding history, preservation and facility provision, including providing advice to
Milton Keynes council in the early 2000s, which helped lead to the creation of the '
Buszy', often considered to be the world's first skate plaza. In London, 2013, he was involved in events around the controversial
Southbank Centre plans to relocate skateboarding on its site. He supported the retention of skateboarding at the original
Undercroft location and elsewhere on the Southbank, appearing in the "Save Our Southbank" and
Long Live Southbank videos to this end, and playing a significant part in the proposed new skateable space underneath the nearby Hungerford Bridge. In 2014, Borden helped
English Heritage list the Rom skatepark in
Hornchurch (constructed 1978), the first such skatepark in Europe to gain heritage protection, and was technical consultant for the
Rom Boys: 40 Years of Rad documentary directed by Matt Harris. Borden has written several articles in national newspapers extolling the history, virtues and benefits of skateboarding to society, and has given advice on skateboard preservation, facility design and provision to numerous city authorities, architects and skatepark manufacturers in the UK and USA. In 2018, Borden helped initiate and design a new skatepark in
Crystal Palace, south London, and two years later he co-authored the Skateboard England,
Skateboard GB and Sport England official
Design and Development Guidance for Skateboarding, a document giving advice on design, construction and build of skateparks and skateable spaces. Iain Borden is Vice-Dean Education (since 2015) at
The Bartlett,
University College London (UCL), and Professor of Architecture and Urban Culture (since 2002). From 2001 to 2009 he was Director/Head of the Bartlett School of Architecture, and from 2010 to 2015 Vice-Dean Communication. In his own research, Borden is particularly well known for his academic studies of everyday occurrences such as car driving, skateboarding, walking and movies in relation to contemporary architecture and public spaces. His books
Skateboarding and the City: a Complete History (
Bloomsbury, 2019) and predecessor
Skateboarding, Space and the City: Architecture and the Body, (
Berg, 2001) offered an analytical and historical account of skateboarding, in part using the philosophy of Henri Lefebvre to interpret this global practice as a creative, political and urban act. His book
Drive: Journeys through Film, Cities and Landscapes (
Reaktion, 2012), similarly explored automobile driving as experiences of cities and urban spaces, using cinematic representations to explore different speeds, landscape and social conditions.
Construct: Large Everyday Architecture (
Routledge, 2026) explores bridges, tunnels, observation wheels, tower cranes and other large scale everyday architectures as symbols of urban and political conditions. ==Bibliography==