Down From the Rooftop, Dan Lacey Gives Overground a Street Address

A London taxi, a Marshall amp stack and a free gate off Brick Lane: Dan Lacey’s second Overground jam swapped a sixteenth floor for the street.

A London taxi spent most of Saturday, July 18 parked in the middle of Ely’s Yard with no fare to collect and no meter running. It was there to be ridden. Across a hot afternoon, pro riders manualed over it, double-pegged rails, spun big and launched off a ramp built to look like an oversized Marshall speaker, while a crowd of a couple hundred, part Brick Lane tourists, part East London locals, part lifers from the BMX scene, gathered around the course to watch.

Signal. What happened: Dan Lacey staged the second Overground LDN, his London street jam with Monster Energy, at ground level on Brick Lane, a year after debuting it on a rooftop sixteen floors up. Exact object: Overground LDN 2026, a free cash-for-tricks BMX jam on a course Lacey designed, run as the London stop of Monster Energy’s Cash-Up series. When and where: Saturday, July 18, 2026, Ely’s Yard at the Old Truman Brewery, Brick Lane, London E1 6QR, free entry with no ticket required. Why it matters: taking a pro-level street jam off a rooftop and into one of East London’s busiest public yards puts core BMX in front of people who never planned to see it, which is the case Lacey keeps making for the event.

The man behind the course was Dan Lacey, the Hastings street rider who has spent more than two decades turning stair sets and handrails into video parts, and who dreamed up Overground with Monster Energy as a London jam of his own. A same-weekend event report credited Lacey with designing the setup himself as a nod to the city’s streetscape: the taxi, a Marshall amp stack and a drop-in access rail. The event listing billed four obstacles, a cash pot of €5,000 and extra prizes from Marshall.

Ely’s Yard sits inside the Old Truman Brewery, the spread of brick buildings on both sides of Brick Lane where Truman’s Black Eagle Brewery brewed from the seventeenth century until it shut in 1989. On a normal weekend the yard is known for street food, markets and exhibition crowds rather than anything on two wheels, and that ordinariness turned out to be the point Lacey kept returning to once the day was over.

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Overground’s first edition took the opposite route. On Friday, July 4, 2025, riders met on a rooftop sixteen floors above the Tobacco Dock area of East London for a jam spread across three spots, with the skyline behind every attempt and cash going to whoever landed. It made for spectacular footage. It also kept the whole thing well above the heads of anyone walking past below.

This summer the jam came down to street level and opened the gate. The 2026 listing billed it as free entry with no ticket needed, and Lacey is convinced the location did real work. Speaking to Steph Pomphrey for Huck’s post-event interview, he said holding the jam in the heart of Brick Lane put the sport in front of new eyes and let them see how good bike riding actually is. He made a similar point on the day itself, describing a setup where passers-by could stumble into BMX culture and watch the competition up close.

That openness is built into the format. Cash-Up stops are not invite-only contests. Local riders who turn up can ride the same course as the sponsored names and get paid on the spot for what they land, which means a local kid and a touring pro can spend the same afternoon chasing the same money off the same taxi. Lacey frames the purpose in similar terms: crews riding together rather than against each other, younger riders seeing what is possible up close, and talent surfacing without anyone having to hand-pick it.

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The Monster Energy Cash-Up series is a simple idea with a slightly anarchic edge. Rather than building a contest circuit of its own, the drinks brand puts money into jams that riders and shops already run, pays out cash for tricks and lets each local setup keep its own character. When Monster announced its 2024 run, the series was already returning after a first summer, with stops in Cologne, Amsterdam, Copenhagen, San Diego and Brisbane, and golden tickets to the next event on offer for standout riders. London joined the rotation through Overground in 2025, and the map has kept widening since; a Zurich edition on August 1, 2026 put up 1,000 Swiss francs at a city skatepark for anyone who could deliver.

Lacey talks about the series as proof that the core of BMX keeps moving, which gave Huck the line for its headline. He credited Monster and Marshall for making these jams happen across Europe and further afield, and for pulling hundreds of riders from around the world into a single day of riding.

Marshall was a fitting partner for a London course. The company traces its first amplifier to 1962 and a music shop in Hanwell, west London, before production moved to Bletchley, which makes a speaker stack about as native a London obstacle as a black cab.

 

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where

Lacey’s own route into the sport ran through exactly the kind of homemade spaces Cash-Up likes to celebrate. Growing up in Rye, East Sussex, he had no skatepark to ride. He and his friends built dirt jumps in a car park, and the council kept flattening them and binning their spades, so many times that nobody kept count, as he told Vans in a profile last September. Eventually they started catching the train to Hastings, where the skatepark and its regulars became a second home.

Hastings had carried weight in British BMX since the nineties, when the Backyard Jams pulled riders from around the world to a notorious dirt jump. Lacey’s break came through school work experience at the Seventies distribution warehouse in the town. He rode the ramps after his shifts, the boss noticed, and he was asked whether he wanted to ride for Federal Bikes, the Hastings brand that has now kept him on its team for two decades. A Federal video filmed in that same warehouse is where much of the BMX world first saw him. Vans followed about five years later, with his first package handed over at the 2010 X Games.

Monster Energy’s rider profile singles him out for spinning huge, clean 360s down stair sets, and while he was never billed as a contest specialist, he has made several street appearances at the X Games and taken wins at events around the world. By his own account, he stepped back from contests around 2013 to focus on video parts, which is where most of his best work lives. He was one of six riders in Above Below, the 2014 film Monster billed as its first full-length BMX feature, sharing it with names including Dakota Roche and Nathan Williams under director Richard Forne, and he later spent four years filming for Endless, much of it in London, before its release in 2024. Federal sells a frame and bars under his name. One event he keeps coming back to is at home: by the time Vans spoke to him last year, he had ridden seven of the first nine Battle of Hastings events, missing the other two only through injury.

London is where he films, and he has thought hard about how. The capital is a little over an hour from Hastings by train, and Lacey has said the central zones are mostly a bust for street riding, heavily controlled and long since filmed out, while the outer stretches toward places like Thamesmead and Lewisham are full of untouched spots. Some days the crew does not ride at all and just hunts. Finding a new spot, he told Vans, “gives you the same buzz as getting a clip.”

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This year’s Overground came together while Lacey was adjusting to fatherhood. He told Huck that juggling the two worked largely because his partner held everything down at home while he was away at meetings or out on the ramp build, which ran to eight-hour days, every day, for nearly four weeks. He was generous about her, and about the people who built the jam with him; in his telling the day belonged to the crew, the sponsors and the riders who turned up to ride or simply hang out.

Becoming a parent has also made him look at his own career from the other side. He is not sure he wants his daughter getting into bikes to the degree he did, because the thought of her getting hurt frightens him, and he admits he has no idea how his mum sat through years of watching him get hurt chasing tricks and filming. It is a fair question from someone who spent the spring of 2025 recovering from surgery. These days his routine starts with a couple of hours in the gym and physio before the train to London, a deliberate change from how he treated his body when he was younger.

He is optimistic about who comes next. Lacey says he meets kids and riders in country after country with a ridiculous amount of talent, and that the heaviest riding no longer comes only from the pros. He sees that spread as a sign the sport is healthy wherever you happen to live. Closer to home, he has described a British scene full of small crews filming constantly, a long way from his own teenage years, when ten of them would crowd round at his house to watch whichever VHS or DVD had just dropped.

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The third Overground was on Lacey’s mind before the second had even finished. He told Huck he would like to see it move indoors, potentially in winter, because “there’s only so many times you can risk the British weather.” He floated a two-day format, a bigger course with bigger obstacles, and room for music, art and photography exhibitions to bring other corners of the culture in. He also wants to hear from the riders about what they would like it to become.

Finding that roof in London has just got harder. On August 2, two weeks after the jam, Better closed the indoor skate park at Barking Sporthouse, citing several years of declining use and operating losses, to make way for the borough’s first permanent indoor padel courts as part of a £2 million refit. Huck had described it as London’s largest, and only remaining, full-size indoor skatepark.

Hastings settled its own version of the problem a decade ago. Source Park opened in 2016 inside the old White Rock Baths, a Victorian bathing complex built beneath the town’s seafront promenade, turning a building that had sat derelict since the late nineties into an all-weather park.

Lacey has spent more than twenty years on the road with the Federal crew and the Monster team, and he counts those trips with friends as the most fun he has had on a bike. Asked what he rides to, Lacey told Huck his playlist jumps between old school hip hop, reggae, classical and heavy metal, depending on the moment and the mood.