Get A Carpark PHD In Surf History At The Center Of Radical Education

There comes a time in every man’s life where he wants to set down some physical roots. 

Lennie and George dreamed of fields filled with alfalfa, an Englishman’s home is his castle. etc.

For former Stab ed turned Red Bull’s No Contest anchor Ashton Goggans, it’s the Center for Radical Education, aka C.O.R.E — a surf shop-turned-archive-turned-museum in the Waialua Industrial estate on the North Shore of Oahu. 

“The space is built around an archive that people can come and access,” Ashton tells me via FaceTime. simultaneously giving me a guided tour of the top floor of C.O.R.E.

As he explains, it’s a hardwood structure that was formerly a sugar mill, then Dick Brewer’s shaping bay, and now it’s packed with tastefully curated — but not too curated — surf memorabilia from throughout the ages.

“So if you wanted to make a surf film, or you were a brand that was trying to find references from the 90s, you have all the magazines here and all the surf films. And then if you’re a shaper, we have this shaping room that has all of Brewer’s original templates, Rich Pavel’s templates, and we’ll slowly be adding iconic touchstone designs from some of these surf films to those templates in the library.”

Ashton pauses for a moment and says, “Ah look there’s Derek, with another beautiful Pavel fish,” turning the screen around to a speck framed by tropical green mountains. Moments later the screen’s flipped again and I realise that “Derek” is actually “Darrick” — as in legendary North Shore waterman and Strapped Crew OG Darrick Doerner — with whom I exchange shakas, before Ashton explains that he and “Double D” are partners in this venture. The plot thickens. 

As Ashton explains, Darrick’s had the keys to the space since Dick passed, but hasn’t been in suitable health to clear the decks of industrial sugar-processing gear to get the place up and running. Double D got talking to Ashton — something AG’s undeniably good at — and together they developed a plan. After much elbow grease from Ashton and a little help from his old man, who blows in and out of frame too, C.O.R.E. was born. 

Ashton and I shoot the shit for the best part of an hour. The anecdotes are many, plenty are unsharable here (Hawaii’s still raw on every front, and thank Duke for that), but I learn that when Urban Outfitters in Honolulu closed, Ashton ended up relieving the three-story, beach-side mega flex of all its beech wood fittings, which now make up the majority of C.O.R.E’s interior. 

C.O.R.E. is soft-opening as of now — feel free to swing in and ogle some truly remarkable pieces of surfing folklore — and will be hard launching next winter as a place for morning coffee, parties, brand activations, movie nights, classic board rental, shaping residencies, you name it. In continuing homage to some of the great surf raconteurs past, you get the impression that Ashton and “Double D”‘s means to keeping the C.O.R.E lights on will evolve with the space. And all with an open door approach — “That’s the key.” 

“When it comes to surfing, the most irritating thing to me is that snotty Hollywood record store cliche where you don’t give people an easy avenue to become educated consumers,” Ashton explains. “It’s the only place that people have besides the parking lot at their spot, which is usually a much more political space to try and like ask basic questions that might feel embarrassing.”

Build it and they will come is a cliche that will forever ring true. Follow C.O.R.E developments here.