Who was Julian Parkinson?

Julian Parkinson was a British BMX freestyle rider. In the middle of 1984 he and Andy Minshull were picked up by Alans in Wigan, the British Torker distributor, to replace Terry Jenkins and Andy Irwin on the Torker Trick Team. He rode the Ford BMX Challenge dealership show circuit that summer, appeared at the Bristol Bike Show in November 1984, took a center page poster in BMX Bi-Weekly doing an X-up one-foot kickturn, and drew the Torker Freestylist frame graphics.

Was Julian Parkinson a BMX racer?

No. He was a freestyle rider, which is why searching the British racing record for him comes up empty. He does not appear in the British BMX Hall of Fame rankings for 1981 to 2005, and he has no recorded race results that we have been able to find. His record is a freestyle record: shows, demonstrations, a magazine poster and a video.

Is Julian Parkinson the same person as Damon Parkinson?

No. They are two different British riders with the same surname, active in the same country in the same few years, and both connected to Torker. Julian Parkinson was a freestyle rider on the Torker Trick Team in 1984. Damon Parkinson was a racer from the Morecambe area who turned Pro, finished with a national number three plate, and got a BMX Bi-Weekly cover on his Torker in 1985. No source we have found says they are related.

What was the Torker Trick Team?

A two-man British freestyle demonstration team run by Alans of Wigan, the Torker distributor, from 1984. The first line-up was Terry Jenkins and Andy Irwin. Midway through 1984 they were replaced by Julian Parkinson and Andy Minshull, who rode the rest of the Ford BMX Challenge dealership tour and the show circuit that followed it.

A BMX History Library chapter · United Kingdom section

Julian Parkinson

Q: Did Julian Parkinson design the Torker Freestylist graphics?

Yes. When the production Freestylist frames reached Britain in late 1984 the team was unimpressed with the factory stickers, so Alans had Julian Parkinson draw a set of wraparound decals using the same Freestylist typeface. They were hand screen printed in Britain with fluorescent inks on gloss white vinyl. The reissued Torker Freestylist frames sold today carry his 1984 artwork.

A shop kid from the Wigan area who got handed a factory freestyle job halfway through the biggest summer British BMX ever had

Legend Bike Co · BMX heritage series

In the summer of 1984 a bike shop in Wigan was running a Ford contract. Ford had given them a new Transit van and a trailer, the trailer carried a quarter pipe and a trick ramp, and the shows ran almost every day across the North of England. It was the single best year British BMX ever had and Alans was in the middle of it.

Halfway through the run, the shop lost both of its riders.

What it did next is the reason this chapter exists. It did not go looking for names. It looked around its own shop floor and picked two lads who were in there most days anyway. One of them was Julian Parkinson, and inside six months he had ridden a national show tour, taken a center page poster in Britain's biggest BMX magazine, been filmed at the Bristol Bike Show, and drawn a set of frame graphics that Torker still puts on bikes forty years later.

Two Parkinsons, and they are not the same man. British BMX in the mid-eighties had two riders named Parkinson, both active in the same handful of years, both connected to Torker. Julian Parkinson — this page — was a freestyle rider on the Torker Trick Team run out of Alans in Wigan. Damon Parkinson was a racer from the Morecambe area who turned Pro, took a national number three plate, and landed a BMX Bi-Weekly cover on his Torker in 1985. Different men, different disciplines, different records. Nothing we have found says they are related, and we are not going to imply it. The library handles this the same way it handles the two JIVEs and the two S&S companies: name the confusion, then keep the two apart on every line.

At a glance. Discipline freestyle · Team Torker Trick Team, from mid-1984 · Run by Alans of Wigan, the British Torker distributor · Teammate Andy Minshull · Replaced Terry Jenkins and Andy Irwin · Bike Torker Freestylist, from late summer 1984 · Documented appearances the Ford BMX Challenge dealership tour, the skatepark at Livingston, the Bristol Bike Show on 2 and 3 November 1984 · Print center page poster and a team interview in BMX Bi-Weekly volume 4 issue 24, 1984 · Also designed the Torker Freestylist frame graphics

Why the racing archive never found him

This chapter nearly did not get written. An earlier attempt at it went through the British racing record properly — the British BMX Hall of Fame rankings covering 1981 to 2005, the inductee lists, the interviews, the team-by-team surveys — and found nothing at all. The conclusion drawn was that Julian Parkinson did not exist, and that the name was probably a garbled version of Damon Parkinson.

That was the wrong archive. Bill Ryan, who owns Torker, put it plainly in August 2026: Julian Parkinson was on the Torker Freestyle team. Freestyle riders in Britain in 1984 did not turn up in race rankings because they were not racing. They were doing shows, and shows leave a different kind of paper trail — magazine posters, video tapes, shop ledgers, sticker sheets. Once you go and look at that trail instead, he is right there in it, more than once, under his own name.

It is worth saying out loud because the same mistake is easy to repeat. A rider missing from the results is not a rider who was not there.

The shop, the van, and the contract

Alans of Wigan had been importing American BMX into the North West since 1980 and by 1984 was the British home of Torker. Freestyle was taking off, so the shop launched a two-man Torker Trick Team. The first line-up was Terry Jenkins from Liverpool and Andy Irwin from Southport. Jenkins was the smooth one; by Alan Woods's own account his rollbacks were as good as Bob Haro's. Irwin attacked everything flat out. Both had a hand in specifying what became the Torker Freestylist frame, and neither of them ever rode one.

Then came the Ford job — a summer-long series of demonstrations at Ford dealerships across the North, under the Ford BMX Challenge banner. Woods has described the logistics without much romance: a brand new Transit, a trailer hauling a quarter pipe and a trick ramp, and shows almost every day.

Midway through, Woods went on holiday to Corfu. There were still shows on the books. By the time he came back, Jenkins and Irwin were gone. In Woods's telling he is not even certain what happened, only that something did, and that the tour still needed two riders on it by the weekend.

So the shop picked, in his words, two local unknowns who used to come down to the shop: Julian Parkinson and Andy Minshull. And the show went on.

That is a promotion with no audition and no results sheet behind it. It happened because they were in the room and they could ride.

The Freestylist, and the stickers

By the end of that summer the production Freestylist frames finally landed in Britain, and Parkinson and Minshull switched onto them. They were the first riders anywhere to campaign the frame in public — the two men who had designed it never got to.

The frames arrived with disappointing decals. Some of them, by Alans's account, came through wearing plain Torker Pro-X downtube stickers, which is not much of a look for a bike named the Freestylist. So the shop handed the job to the rider who could draw.

Parkinson worked up a set of wraparound decals using the same Freestylist typeface, and Alans had them hand screen printed in Britain with fluorescent inks on gloss white vinyl. That is a set of frame graphics designed by a rider on a two-man show team, printed locally, to fix a factory's mistake.

They stuck. When Torker brought the Freestylist back into production decades later, the graphics on it were described in the catalog copy as 1984 UK-style Julian Parkinson designed Freestylist graphics. A bag of the original 1984 screen-printed stickers turned up in storage and went on sale as new old stock, still credited to him by name. Not many riders from a two-man regional demo team have their artwork on a bike in a current catalog.

The center page, 1984

The print record is small and it is specific.

BMX Bi-Weekly, the Morecambe fortnightly that was Britain's main BMX magazine, ran volume 4 issue 24 in late 1984. The surviving contents index for that issue lists a center page pull-out poster of Julian Parkinson doing an X-up one-foot kickturn. The same issue carries an interview with the new Torker Trick Team, and a look at the new Torker Trick Team elsewhere in the book.

Read that as a package and it tells you the shape of the thing. The magazine ran the poster and the interview together, in the same number, weeks after these two had been pulled off a shop floor. Whoever was editing knew the story was the new line-up.

There was a photo shoot for the magazine as well, done locally rather than at any skatepark. Minshull was shot at the Three Sisters industrial estate next to the BMX track at Ashton-in-Makerfield, and Parkinson a few hundred yards away, outside the fish bar in the middle of town. Whether that shoot produced the poster or something else in the run, we cannot say. But the location is the point: a factory freestyle team being photographed outside a chip shop in Ashton-in-Makerfield is about as accurate a picture of British BMX in 1984 as exists.

Bristol, 2 and 3 November 1984

The best piece of evidence on Julian Parkinson is not printed. It is on tape, and anyone can watch it.

On 2 and 3 November 1984 the Bristol Bike Show was held at the Watershed in Bristol, and someone put cameras on the freestyle. The result was released as Freestyle BMX The Video, and a VHS copy of it survives. The billing, as recorded on the tape and repeated everywhere it has been catalogued since, reads: freestyle demonstrations by Andy Preston and Mike Pardon; the Skyway Trick Team of Paul Hudson, Craig Campbell and Billy Stupple; and the Torker Trick Team of Julian Parkinson and Andy Minshall.

That is the top of the British freestyle scene in one room over one weekend, and the Torker pair are billed alongside all of it. Preston and Pardon were the two riders doing freestyle segments on Saturday morning television. Campbell was the first European rider Haro signed. Parkinson and Minshull had been on the team a matter of months.

Between the Ford tour and Bristol they also spent a few days riding the skatepark at Livingston in Scotland, which in 1984 was the best concrete in the country and a long way from a Ford forecourt.

On the spelling. His teammate appears in the record as both Andy Minshull and Andy Minshall. Alans, who put him on the team, writes Minshull. The video billing and the catalog entries derived from it write Minshall. We use Minshull in our own prose and leave the video billing as it stands, because that is what the tape says.

Then the record stops

It stops because the company did.

By November 1984 Torker in the United States had filed for bankruptcy. Alans went on selling out of stock it had bought at auction in February 1985 and kept a British race team going, but by then, in Alan Woods's flat assessment, BMX was really on the wane here in the UK. The bottom fell out of the British market almost as fast as it had appeared.

Whatever happened to the Torker Trick Team after that, we have not found it written down. There is no contest placing for Julian Parkinson anywhere in the freestyle record we searched. He is not a British BMX Hall of Fame inductee, and he was not among the freestyle nominees or inductees when that Hall opened its freestyle categories in 2022. As far as the paper goes, he arrives in the middle of 1984, does a great deal in about six months, and then the sport he arrived into collapses underneath him.

He left more behind than most riders with longer careers. There is a poster, a video, a show tour, and a set of frame graphics that outlived the company that commissioned them.

Where the record runs thin

Almost everything personal. We have no date of birth, no full name beyond Julian Parkinson, no home town more precise than the Wigan area, and no confirmed age in 1984. He is described only as a local unknown who used to come into the shop.
Living or deceased. The record is silent. We found no obituary, no memorial and no statement either way, and we are not going to guess at a man's status to round out a page. If you know, tell us.
Any relation to Damon Parkinson. Two British riders, same surname, same few years, both on Torker, both in the North West orbit. No source we found connects them as family or otherwise. A shared surname is not evidence and we are treating it as nothing more than that.
How long he stayed. Documented on the team from midway through 1984 to at least early November 1984. When the Torker Trick Team stopped, and whether he rode for anyone afterward, is not established.
Contest results. None found, in any British freestyle contest, at any level. He may simply never have entered — a show rider and a contest rider were different jobs in 1984. But we searched, and there is nothing, and we would rather say so than leave the impression we did not look.
The Bristol report in print. BMX Bi-Weekly volume 4 issue 23 is indexed as carrying a report on the Bristol freestyle show. That is very likely the same 2 and 3 November event, but we have not seen the pages and have not confirmed it, so we are not claiming the coverage names him.
The photo shoot detail. The Three Sisters and fish bar locations come from an account posted by Alan Woods on a collectors' forum thread, reached only through a search index and not read on the page itself. We have flagged it here rather than pretend it is as solid as the rest.
Freestyle BMX magazine. The sister title launched by the same Morecambe family in April 1984 ran a Torker trick team interview in its July 1984 issue. July is before the change of line-up, so that interview is almost certainly Terry Jenkins and Andy Irwin, not Parkinson and Minshull, and we have not attributed it to him. Whether he appears in any later issue of Freestyle BMX is unknown; we could not check a complete run.
The poster image itself. We have the contents listing for volume 4 issue 24 describing it. We have not seen a scan of the poster.

Timeline

Early 1984 — Alans of Wigan launches a two-man Torker Trick Team: Terry Jenkins of Liverpool and Andy Irwin of Southport. Both contribute ideas to the Torker Freestylist frame.
Summer 1984 — the shop takes a contract for a season of Ford BMX Challenge demonstrations at Ford dealerships across the North, running out of a Ford Transit and a trailer carrying a quarter pipe and a trick ramp.
Midway through the tour, 1984 — Jenkins and Irwin leave. Julian Parkinson and Andy Minshull, two riders who used the shop, are put on the team and finish the run.
End of summer 1984 — the production Freestylist frames arrive in Britain. Parkinson and Minshull switch onto them. Parkinson redesigns the frame decals; they are hand screen printed in Britain in fluorescent inks on gloss white vinyl.
Autumn 1984 — shows across the UK, including a few days at the skatepark at Livingston in Scotland. A magazine photo shoot is done locally around Ashton-in-Makerfield.
2 and 3 November 1984 — the Bristol Bike Show at the Watershed, Bristol. The Torker Trick Team performs alongside Andy Preston, Mike Pardon and the Skyway Trick Team, and the whole thing is filmed for Freestyle BMX The Video.
Late 1984 — BMX Bi-Weekly volume 4 issue 24 runs a center page poster of Parkinson doing an X-up one-foot kickturn, plus an interview with the new Torker Trick Team.
November 1984 — Torker files for bankruptcy in the United States.
February 1985 — Alans buys Torker stock at auction and keeps the brand alive in Britain with a race team.
2020s — the Torker Freestylist is reissued carrying Parkinson's 1984 graphics, and a surviving bag of the original screen-printed stickers is found and sold as new old stock.

Why he counts

Most of the riders in this library are in it because of what they won. Julian Parkinson is in it because of what he did on days when nobody was keeping score.

British freestyle in 1984 was not a contest circuit. It was demonstrations — car parks, dealership forecourts, bike shows, a plywood quarter pipe dragged behind a Transit van. Thousands of British kids saw BMX for the first time at one of those, and a fair number of them went and bought a bike because of it. There is no ranking table that records that work. The riders who did it are remembered, when they are remembered at all, in the back of a magazine or the credits of a VHS tape.

He also did the thing almost no rider gets to do. He drew the graphics on the bike. Four decades on, a company on the other side of the Atlantic is still printing his artwork on frames, and putting his name on the product page while it does it. Riders get forgotten. Sticker sets, it turns out, are harder to kill.

Sources

Bill Ryan, owner of Torker, in conversation, 19 August 2026 — the firsthand statement that Julian Parkinson was on the Torker Freestyle team, which is what sent this research into the freestyle archive rather than the racing one. Alan Woods, Alans BMX, "Countdown to T-Day," alansbmx.com, entries dated 2, 4, 6, 7 and 8 April 2024 — the founding of the two-man Torker Trick Team with Terry Jenkins and Andy Irwin, their input into the Freestylist design and the fact that they never rode it, the Ford dealership contract and the Transit and trailer, the mid-tour change of line-up, Parkinson and Minshull as two local unknowns who used to come down to the shop, the arrival of the Freestylist frames at the end of summer, Parkinson's redesign of the stickers in fluorescent inks, the days at the skatepark in Scotland, Torker's bankruptcy filing by November 1984 and the February 1985 stock auction. torkerracing.com, Torker Freestylist 1984 NOS frame and fork sticker listing — the account of the underwhelming factory decals, some frames arriving with plain Pro-X downtube stickers, and Julian Parkinson being asked to draw wraparound stickers in the Freestylist typeface, hand screen printed with fluorescent inks on gloss white vinyl; and the current Freestylist frame listings crediting 1984 UK-style Julian Parkinson designed Freestylist graphics. 23mag.com, BMX Bi-Weekly issue index, volume 4 issue 24, 1984 — the contents listing recording a center page poster of Julian Parkinson doing an X-up one-foot kickturn, an interview with the new Torker Trick Team, and a look at the new Torker Trick Team in the same issue. Internet Archive, "Freestyle BMX The Video (1984)," archive.org — the tape itself, taken from an original VHS, with its billing of the Bristol Bike Show at the Watershed on 2 and 3 November 1984 and the Torker Trick Team of Julian Parkinson and Andy Minshall. Flat Matters Online, "Old School Sundays — Freestyle BMX / The Video 1984," 3 January 2016 — the same billing, independently posted. 23mag.com, Freestyle BMX UK issue index, 1984 — the Torker trick team interview in issue 4, July 1984, used here only to establish that the July interview predates the change of line-up. DIG BMX, "The first ever UK BMX Hall of Fame Freestyle Inductees," 11 November 2022 — checked for his name; he is not among the 2022 freestyle inductees or honorable mentions.

Searched and empty on this subject: the British BMX Hall of Fame rankings 1981 to 2005, its inductee list and its interview archive; bmxultra.com; universityofbmx.com; retrobike.co.uk; radbmx.co.uk; and Ride UK. Checked and unreachable at the time of research: bmxsociety.com and bmxmuseum.com, the latter of which holds a Torker Freestylist thread that a search index shows contains further Alan Woods material we could not read directly.

If you have a scan of the BMX Bi-Weekly volume 4 issue 24 poster, a show flyer, a photograph, or any idea where Julian Parkinson is today, that is exactly what this chapter is missing. It can be sent through the contact page.

Last reviewed: August 2026. This chapter is short because the record is short, not because the rider was minor. It will be updated as source material surfaces.

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