It is a slice of California cool in Hornchurch, east London, a concrete mecca for skaters, scooter riders and BMX-ers, and it is to become the first skatepark in Europe to be given listed heritage status.

English Heritage will on Wednesday announce that the Rom is to be Grade II listed, joining the Victorian cricket pavilions and art deco swimming pools more readily associated with Britain’s built sporting heritage.

“It is a rather beautiful piece of construction,” said Simon Inglis, the sports historian who wrote English Heritage’s Played in London book on which the listing is based. “You might look at it and say it’s just a series of holes in the ground. But actually it’s a very sensual series of undulations and a properly designed course … it’s a bit like a grand prix track.”

The Rom was built in 1978 by Adrian Rolt and G-Force, the leading skatepark designers of the period, and very little – bar the fashions and haircuts of the people using it – has changed since.

“The styles might have moved on but the actual joy of being on a skateboard and hurtling around a piece of concrete has lived on,” said Inglis.

The Rom was closely based on Californian skateparks. It takes up 8,000 sq m next to the River Rom. It has a series of bowls and hollows with names like the Pool, the Moguls and the Performance Bowl, based on the “vertibowl” at Paramount skatepark.

The listing singles out the Rom as the best example of a small number of British skateparks that still survive as they were built from the early heyday of the skateboarding boom.

Inglis said skateboarding was, and sometimes still is, written off as a fad that would go the same way as chopper bikes or space hoppers. This has not happened and it was interesting researching his book, on 200 years of sporting heritage in London, that “we were talking to the grandchildren of some of the earlier skateboarders. We were meeting skateboarders who were now collecting their pensions – they had never let go of the faith.”

Anyone wanting further proof of skateboarding’s continuing cultural importance only has to look at the experience of the Southbank Centre, which attempted to move the skaters who use its undercroft further up the river to Hungerford bridge. The centre said it was the only way to help pay for a £120m redevelopment, but the skaters refused to budge and Southwark council received 27,000 objections. The skaters, also backed by mayor Boris Johnson, won.

Inglis said the arrival of skateboarding was an important moment in British sporting history. “The skatepark revolution signified a switch in how young boys, particularly, expressed themselves through sport,” he said. Previously it was all about knuckling down for team and physical contact sports but a skateboard allowed you to be creative and expressive as an individual … “balletic even”, said Inglis.

The Rom is the first skatepark anywhere in Europe to be listed and only the second in the world, with the first being the Bro Bowl in Tampa, Florida, which was added to the USA’s National Register of Historic Places in October 2013.

The UK heritage minister Ed Vaizey said the Rom was as popular today as it was in the 1970s: “Its listing at Grade II is testament to its design and also highlights how the UK’s unique heritage reflects all parts of our culture and history.”

Roger Bowdler, English Heritage’s designation director, said skateboarding was more than a sport – “it has become a world wide cult. The Rom is the finest example in England to this aspect of youth culture, and we are delighted its special interest will be protected for future generations through listing. It gives the whole idea of heritage an extra twist.”

Inglis agreed: “They [skateparks] are part of the urban narrative of British life and this is, I think, a recognition that street culture is as worthy of consideration as any highfalutin public school sport. As we saw from the Southbank campaign, they are as important as any school pavilion or Victorian swimming pool.”