HTL Omega: The Fate Of Empires

Henry Edwards-Wood has dropped “HTL-Omega: The Fate Of Empires” adding to his incredibly strong back catalogue of impeccable video productions.

Featuring Louie Jones, Jacob Sawyer, Jeremy Jones, Charlie Munro, Jak Pietryga, Nelly Mayelle, Greg Conroy, Jin Shimizu, Cass Doig, Ben Grove, Tom Knox, Ryan Cunnigham & many more.

If you scroll below the video, Henry has written some words as a kind of love letter to the process of this offering which we recommend you take in.

Maximum respect to Henry for his incredible output over the years.

HTL OMEGA: The Fate Of Empires

The belated final instalment of the Hold Tight London saga featuring Louie Jones, Jacob Sawyer and an eclectic supporting cast of skateboarders, filmed between 2020 and 2024. 

A message from the maker…



Though on the surface skate videos might seem a crude and simple format, anyone who has been involved in their production will tell you they are complex and emotional things. It is how they are made that makes them complex, and the unpredictability of that process that makes them emotional. This process and its many facets is central to the culture of skateboarding, where seeing is believing and evidence is inspiration. We all know the drill – learn tricks, find spots, get clips, make an edit – it’s the archetypal narrative of modern skateboarding and a creative brief that allows for an incredible spectrum of diverse aesthetics and conceptual themes.

The individuals who step forward and put their body on the line to do or document something remarkable, each play their part in producing the raw materials for an edit. These materials must still take a very particular form – a completed trick or a sequence of completed tricks captured in a sequence of images. These forms are the atomic elements of the skate video format, with each one representative of the happenstance and architecture that lead to its creation but also of the eternal archetype of the trick enacted. Combined in artful ways and woven together with carefully chosen music and incidental imagery, these elements can find new meaning or narrative purpose in the mind of the editor or the eyes of the viewer. None of us can deny the instructive and emotive potency of our favourite or formative videos, even if in 2026 that means an instagram clip that made you want to learn to ollie. They also often contain a subtle richness of aesthetic that is incidentally infused by the variety of environments in which these tricks occur and the infinite details that may be glimpsed as they fly by in the background. It’s true that not all tricks are worth documenting and not all videos are works of art, but I like to think that their purveyors would think of them as such.

As a maker myself, my clips are sacred and the process by which an edit comes to manifest on my machine is always a mystical one. From the early spot hunts, speculative filming ventures and wishful mock-up edits to the finely milled pieces that have made their way out into the public realm, each project takes on a life of its own and has lived through the choices and actions of myself and the rider’s I filmed. Clips don’t appear by magic (though in the early HTL days it felt like they did), they require intention and effort from both rider and filmer. Aside from the obvious novelty and achievement captured in that moment, these clips accrue meaning, value and character through the combined endeavour and little miracles that lead to their existence, but they can also take on a higher significance in the context of a rider, spot or scene’s grander narrative.

I have been the custodian of these strange invaluable items called clips almost as long as I have been a skateboarder, each one a strange ethereal commodity wishing to be both shared and hoarded at the same time. In the hours spent logging and labelling these little micro-adventures, I can’t help but speculate and anticipate where they will end up and what part they might play in some bigger plot. Once captured and logged these clips become syntactic visual elements for me to combine and compose in the timeline, but any single clip could be that spark of inspiration or revelation for a future viewer, or a missing piece of a puzzle for a fellow filmer or documentary maker. Until they are all appropriately curated and published the final purpose and potential of a clip lays silently undecided (unless perhaps I already know that it’s that all important ender and its deadline day!). It is the joy of the editor to uncover that perfect place and purpose for each clip in some larger scheme but it can also be heart breaking to make those hard choices – the tough cuts, the big screen dreams that never where, the clip that lost its impact cos I sat on it too long, that sequence I spent weeks on that doesn’t work any more or that beautiful moment when I stumble across that long lost gem just when I need it.


Somehow after long periods of time making thousands of these choices and then making them work technically I find myself with the thing we always set out to make just cast in the way this particular one had to be cast. The telos of this final piece pulls this process forward out of time and necessity until it exists as a coherent whole; built brick by brick, trick by trick, each one forged of its own unique ingredients but cast from a single mould. Skateboarding is still an eternal muse for me, and the alchemical process of making videos about it remains close to my heart. The eternal forms I see at play in the patterns that exist in and between these tricks continue to captivate my imagination and have informed many new projects outside the realm of video production that are now the focus of my time and attention. Pursuing these new paths on my journey through life with this magical plank of wood and its synergetic side effects has led me to many new takes on this beautiful game we play. These shifts in perspective and motivation, mixed with feeling the weight of saying goodbye to the role that previously gave me so much purpose and drive has made the process of completing the last HTL edit perhaps the most emotional of all. 

Like many videos, HTL Omega started life as one thing, quickly morphed into another thing and then suddenly became the right thing for the wrong time until it morphed again and became the thing it apparently always wanted to be. I can say that now at the other end of another painful and emotional process, though it’s a slightly different set of emotions this time as I know the authentic moment for its release has long passed. In this sense this film isn’t an update on the current state of the scene or highlights of the most recent adventures of a given crew like the previous HTL volumes, it’s a retrospective snapshot of the London skate world at the point I hung up my camera – the hardest thing I have ever had to do in skateboarding. Structurally it’s just a rework of a smaller edit that never came out with a new montage grafted on the front that I have pieced together from unused footage and ideas that never went anywhere. Personally, editing this has just been something to tinker with in my down time and an outlet for a modality of creation that is now second nature to me but that is no longer fuelled by the endless filming missions that once characterised my life. I now do different things with my time but I was finally moved to say goodbye to the HTL series this February by a prompting message from Louie Jones, who was a major focal point for the missions that made it into this one.

The production of this edit spans a transitional time in my life after some lost years wrangling with myself, my culture and a mental health system that hinders and harasses far more than it helps or heals.  Most of the footage in the second half of the edit was filmed when I was living in a sort of half way house for crazy people where it was simpler to just grab the camera bag, fly out the door and run off to film in familiar streets everyday, instead of staying in that patronising and sometime toxic living situation, though I was grateful for the shelter. Whilst treading water, waiting to qualify for and bid on a council property, I quietly rebuilt some confidence through marching myself through the one process I have always known how to do – get clips, make edits, make sense of it, make art out of it. In this way the camera bag has always been a cross I will choose to bear when I don’t know what else to do.

Motivated by the resurgent careers of Louie Jones, Tom Lock and Jacob Sawyer, I soon found myself documenting skaters older than myself who were still giving it and pushing themselves for the kicks and for the sake of the art. This deeply inspired me to keep pushing myself to do the same with the camera. Jeremy Jones also had me on standby to find the right angles so that other people could see the invisible and paradoxical spots that he does, and before I knew it I was linking up with a few heads from the new generation and scheming on another Hold Tight production taking shape. A lot of the Louie footage ended up going via Palace Skateboards to Austin Bristow’s Portions video but Austin kindly let me have a lot of his offcuts in return which added many new faces to the timeline and another dimension to the piece that was forming.


One day, while Jeremy was eying up a nondescript bollard and ignoring the spot we had gone to actually look at, I found myself chatting to Simon Franks (vocalist for Audio Bullys and good friend of Jeremy) who was out on the mission with us. I have used many of his tracks in the Hold Tight London videos over the years and had been stoked to get to know him a little bit,  having always been a fan. That day he literally just turned around and said “You should use this track in a video, I bet you never heard it”. I hadn’t heard it, it was banging and his words echoed in my head as I made my way home that night. A few months later I found myself introducing Louie to Simon at the opening of SB Skateshop’s unfortunately short lived pop up on Lower Marsh. This was just a few minutes before screening what had become “The Fate of Empires”  – a new HTL Supplement video starring Louie and set to the very track Simon had told me to use. I have been lucky to have had many moments like these afforded to me at the end of a skate project – where dreams, intentions and weeks of editing fury culminate in a moment of completion, but this was even more profound for me at that point as I was just about to leave sheltered accommodation and move into a new permanent council flat – having danced around in purgatory for a year and a half.



As you might imagine, my life changed drastically a few weeks later when I woke up in a new home in a new area and set about rebuilding my life after years of instability. The financial pressures of the new situation and a mind and body exhausted from years of uncertainty meant I could no longer give any time or attention to go towards filming. I spent a few years slowly getting myself and my new home together whilst beginning to reorient towards a new type of work and preparing to commit myself to making a new long term life dream a reality. During that time I had been holding out on the HTL supplement edit for Vinny, owner of SB Skateshop, to get a permanent shop in Waterloo. His first pop up had had the rug pulled out from under it almost as soon as it had opened and so he had reverted to an online setup. I like my edits to belong somewhere and hopefully do some good for some independent entity in skateboarding, but unfortunately the SB dream came to an end for Vinny after another short lived pop up venture didn’t work out.

The moment had passed for the aptly named Fate Of Empires edit (which I had figured would be re-screened and then put online for SB) and by then I was already deep into the early stages of a great work I am now 5 years into. It now appears almost unchanged as the second half of HTL Omega and I would like to apologize to the riders whose footage has not come out till now, especially to some of the younger ones like Cass and Sergio who could have benefited from the coverage back then.

The first half of HTL Omega has its own story, but the story is more about the transition in perspective and vocation for me – the editor of a series of videos has spanned 19 years and been my primary creative focus in life for all of that time. I have put together this montage from fragments of unreleased clips from multiple projects that tailed off once I finally accepted I had to give up filming and start down a new path. Making this goodbye piece has been my getaway from the more abstruse studies and tasks I now find myself undertaking in the realm of mathematics, ontology and programming. I taught myself to use a new editing program in order to make the edit and undertook to dig out any last clips and incidentals that I could find on my hard drives, finding a way to make it all work together has be a little creative puzzle I have returned to for short periods over the last 4 years. 

My new work, a mathematical and syntactical theory of skateboard trick combination and classification, is informed by the hours of clip logging that have gone into the videos I have made. This one intuitively obvious but fundamental part of the data retrieval side of video production has lead me into a world of symbols, semantics and hyper-dimensional geometry in an attempt to capture and model the patterns I see in skateboarding that have informed my editing processes non-verbally since I was a teenager. This project has grown out of a lifetime of studying and analysing the procedures, forms and constraints that govern the world of the skateboarder but has come with a steep learning curve and a whole new set of skills to acquire. Allowing myself some time to cut, splice and play with my final hoard of clips has been a kind of creative reward to myself and a constant reminder of the art that has led to my current theoretical studies. After weeks of abstract analytical work, the antidote has always been the abstract aestheticism of the filmmaking modality, so making this final little goodbye piece has been a kind of therapy for me, and part of me is sad to let it go. 

Pursuing these clips and trying to make sense of them over the last 20 years has given me my own kind of place and purpose in this world, so I would like to say thank you to all the riders, fellow filmers and viewers who helped make the HTL series happen, from Morph, Brooks and the original 2007 heads to any one that ever landed a trick for me over the years (or spotted in the road so that someone else might land one). The HTL saga was cast out of a million little stories that I will never remember and a million more that I will never forget, so thank you to all that played their part. It is with a heavy heart and much reverence that I find myself now officially retiring the Hold Tight London series, but I take solace in the fact that the spirit and community it was always trying to capture and convey lives on in the exploits and output of the current generation of crews out there doing their thing, their way. I have been blessed to witness pure magic unfold at the feet of London’s finest from as close a vantage point as I could possibly manage and have many times been humbled by the love I have felt from those that appreciate the videos I have made. It has been a privilege and an honour and one hell of a saga!



Thank you Skateboarding, thank you London and thank you Universe.

Safe,



Henry