On a late summer’s day in 1978, I walked out of the clubhouse at Rom skatepark, set down my Sims skateboard, and pushed out across its sun-soaked concrete landscape. All around were the Fords, repair shops and semi-detached houses of Hornchurch. But I didn’t see them. For this wonderful moment, in my head, I was in California.

Along with many of the UK’s keen new skateboarders, I had pored over descriptions of American skateparks in the pages of Skateboarder and Skateboard! magazines, drooled over dramatic pics of west coast skateboarders called things like Stacy and Jay, and sat open-jawed through Skateboard: the Movie in which the same professionals executed impossible moves beneath bright blue skies. So when I took that tentative first roll across Rom’s pristine surfaces – one of the largest and best of the skateparks developers were then rushing out across the UK – it was a dream come true.

What I and my fellow skaters found in this detached backwater seemed like nothing less than skateboard paradise – a concrete oasis planted in the most unlikely of city settings. It had, we thought, everything. In this vast playground of fantastical shapes, all purpose-designed for skateboarding, we could perform perpetual turns down the long half-pipe, trace infinite lines around the cloverleaf of interlocking bowls, charge between the egg-crate moguls, chase bobsleigh-like trajectories down the sinuous snake run, or simply scare ourselves witless in the dark depths of the performance bowl. Slap down the middle, a massive slalom incline ended in a large reservoir, ideal for surf-style banked turns. And standing front and centre was – praise the skateboard gods! – the centrepiece: a keyhole-shaped pool, a gleaming chunk of pure, white, alabaster-smooth terrain, complete with blue tiles and stone coping blocks, just like a swimming pool but now perfectly attuned to skateboarding. In this most challenging of terrains, similar to the vertical drum of a fairground wall of death, the bravest could carve at high speed, grind trucks noisily against the coping, rasp out a staccato shudder of hard wheels along the tiles, or even fly majestically out of it and turn round in mid-air.

As Rom’s centrepiece hinted, these seemingly new skatepark shapes had their origins elsewhere – in domestic swimming pools (which Californian skaters would drain, often without the owner’s consent), in the banked slopes of Los Angeles schoolyards, or in the massive pipes, ditches and other drainage works that skaters had found in the Californian landscape. What skateparks such as Rom did, though, was to take these pools and pipes and make them even better for skateboarding. Rom’s own showpiece pool had been based by its designers (Adrian Rolt and G-Force, who also built a series of similar but smaller parks around the UK) on the pool at Skateboard Heaven skatepark in California, itself based on a real backyard swimming pool in San Diego, and known as the Soul Bowl.

The Californian influence extended beyond the skatepark architecture. Like many UK skaters, I was desperately trying to look like a surfer-skater. Sporting brightly coloured shorts, ocean-patterned T-shirts and long hair, and kitted out in multi-coloured safety gear, we rode expensively imported US equipment. Products from Kryptonics, Tracker, Sims, G&S, Gullwing, Vans, Rector and Powell were on the list of must-haves. We called each other by mysterious-sounding nicknames – Jam, Fridge, Jasper and the Road Rider Kid were among my Oxford-based mates who travelled to Hornchurch. Five marshals, a pro shop, a full-time first-aid nurse, cafe and a resident professional skater helped to complete our skateboard utopia.

Great survivors … Livingston, near Edinburgh, is one park that should also be considered for heritage protection. Photograph: Wig Worland

And, then, everything changed. Even as Rom opened in 1978, skateboarding’s global boom had peaked, and the skatepark quickly changed hands, ownership transferring to John Greenwood, whose family has run it ever since. Of the 100 or so UK skateparks built in the late 1970s, only 20 were still open by 1980. For the next decade, skateboarding endured its dark ages, practised by a few committed souls who relied for sustenance on word of mouth, a few ’zines, Tim Leighton-Boyce’s wonderful RAD magazine and a couple of US skate monthlies. During the 80s, many skaters gave up the sport – including myself, after a nasty fracture sustained at my local half-pipe. On a 1982 visit to Rom with Sean Goff, today the UK’s longest practising pro skater, I saw him and others doing amazing moves, but I also saw a declining skate scene. The 1970s predictions of skateboarding being a short-lived craze looked ominously true.

But while the Californian dream may have been over, something more vibrant was being born. Even by 1980, skaters were cutting their hair short, replacing surf-patterns with punky Day-Glo designs, and generally getting less American and more British. Indie music became an integral part of skateboarding – Ted Nugent and the Eagles gave way to the Clash and Joy Division. Rom somehow kept going, in part through BMX riders’ appreciation of the skatepark’s unique possibilities for high-speed fun (and bloody injury), and from a steady trickle of never-say-die skateboarders who kept up the faith.

Skateboarding’s global boom had already peaked by the time Rom opening … pro skater Sean Goff in 1982.

Fast forward a few years, and skateboarding entered its renaissance. Fuelled by the new street-based skateboarding of the 1990s, the X Games, skateboarding websites on the new-fangled internet, and the immense popularity of pro-skater Tony Hawk’s PlayStation video game, skateboarding took off again in a massive way. By 2000 there were 10 million US skateboarders, and many more worldwide. Skateboarding was becoming big business, and skate shoe company DC alone turned over $500m annually. I hadn’t lost touch with skateboarding either – after starting my doctoral studies in Los Angeles (drawn, more than I should admit, by its sunshine and skateboard history), I later wrote a rather theoretically informed book on skateboarding (Skateboarding, Space and the City, 2001), and have developed a career as an academic historian from this basis. Skateboarding was clearly still a central part of my life.

Other changes were also afoot. Where many 70s skateparks were commercial operations, in the new millennium municipal authorities, youth and charity groups stepped into the breach, and new skateboarding facilities started to appear. One of the earliest of the new generation was Buszy at Milton Keynes, quite possibly the world’s first “skateplaza”, built to emulate the ledges, benches and other elements of typical streets, rather than the extreme “transition” features of skateparks such as Rom. Today, hundreds of facilities (some street-based skateplazas, some transition skateparks, many a combination of both) have appeared around Britain, and no council worth its sport-youth-health policy would dream of not providing at least one of these concrete playgrounds. Several UK companies – Wheelscape, Freestyle, Canvas, Gravity and Mavericks among others – can produce concrete skateparks for almost any taste or budget, nearly all of which trace their origins back to Rom and other 70s parks.

Rom’s fantastical shapes were all purpose-built for skateboarding … the snake run. Photograph: Wig Worland

Today, Rom is very different to the skatepark I first rolled across in 1978. Skateboarders still fly around in all sorts of gravity-defying ways, but the ultra-smooth concrete has turned into an abrasive surface felt right through the skater’s body. The pro shop and cafe departed long ago, leaving a somewhat forlorn entrance more like a scrapyard shack than the original clubhouse.

Does this matter? Not really. The robust, semi-industrial character of Rom today just adds to its atmosphere of being the great survivor, the big daddy of UK skateparks; a sculptural moonscape that remains shockingly out of place in Hornchurch, and whose gritty skateboard-able features still attract, surprise and scare in equal measure. And so when a couple of years ago English Heritage asked me whether listing a 1970s skatepark was a good idea, I was very happy to suggest Rom as the best of the UK’s original skateparks, and to provide an over-enthusiastically long list of justifications. Indeed, some of the other surviving UK skateparks – Stockwell and Harrow in London, Livingston near Edinburgh, and Southsea near Portsmouth – may perhaps not justify similar listed status, but some kind of heritage protection is surely a good idea against urban growth, property developers or revenue-seeking owners. Rom skatepark – like the hotly disputed, but now saved undercroft at London’s Southbank Centre, another recent victory for skate heritage – shows that such places are valuable for cultural, community and social reasons, as well as for their unique architectural qualities.

Back at Rom, another notable change these days is how many skaters are far older than the teenagers who dominated back in the 70s – largely because they have never stopped skating there. Local die-hards such as the legendary Dion, Graham, Paul and many others provide friendly greetings and encouraging noises to the scores of middle-aged skaters who, like myself, have dusted off their old boards and creaky moves. Younger newbies – some of them women – enjoy the same welcome. I last skated there only a few weeks ago, and will go back again soon. And for all the black-clothed, tattooed, postpunk aura of contemporary counter-cultural skateboarding, despite the odd crack and ripple, Rom’s pool remains white, blue-tiled and glisteningly seductive. And it still makes me dream, just a tiny bit, of California.

• Iain Borden’s Skateboarding, Space and the City is published by Bloomsbury. Buy it for £20.99 at bookshop.theguardian.com. A new edition will appear in 2016.