A history of British surfing: where did it actually start?

Surfing is a warm-water sport. It was perfected in the bathwater of Hawaii, spread to sun-drenched California and Australia, and arrived in the British imagination as something that happened to bronzed people a very long way from here. And yet Britain, with its grey skies, its biting Atlantic and a sea that rarely troubles fifteen degrees, has one of the deepest and hardiest surf cultures in the world. So how on earth did that happen? Where did British surfing actually start?

The honest answer, and the reason this is such a good story, is that there isn't a single neat beginning. There are several competing "firsts," each measuring something slightly different, and trying to crown just one misses the point. British surfing didn't begin on a single day; it crept ashore over a century, carried by Hawaiian princes and a crime novelist, by soldiers home from the trenches, by a man who built a board and took it on a train to Cornwall, and finally by a handful of Australian lifeguards who brought the modern board and lit the fuse. This is that story, from the first recorded wave to the wave pools of today, told as a journey around the British coast, because British surfing is, more than anything, a story of place. Where the history is solid we'll say so, and where the "firsts" are disputed, we'll lay out the rival claims and let you decide.

There is no single "first," and that's the best part

Start with the thing that trips up every casual telling: at least three different places get called "the birthplace of British surfing," and they're all sort of right, because they're measuring different things.

The earliest recorded surfing in Britain happened at Bridlington, in Yorkshire, in 1890. The first organised British surfing, and the first surf club, was in Jersey in 1923. And the earliest home-grown British stand-up surfing ever captured on film was at Newquay in 1929. On top of that, the first genuinely modern, Hawaiian-style board to be ridden in Britain is usually dated to 1935. None of these contradicts the others; they're four different milestones on a long road, and the marketing phrase "birthplace of British surfing" gets stuck onto whichever one a particular town wants to claim.

It's worth knowing, too, that Britain had been aware of surfing for well over a century before it had any of its own. Crew on Captain Cook's voyages encountered surfing in the Pacific in the 1770s; a British captain documented surfing in West Africa in 1835; bathers at Brighton were using wood-and-leather mitts to bodysurf by 1850; a swimming manual described surfboards in 1867; and by 1876 a travel writer was openly suggesting somebody ought to introduce surfing to England. The idea was in the air for generations. It just took a long time to find the water.

That gap, between Britain knowing about surfing and Britain actually doing it, is itself revealing. For most of the nineteenth century, surfing was something Britons read about in accounts of far-off colonies, an exotic curiosity from the Pacific, admired but not attempted. It took the combination of cheaper travel, returning servicemen who'd seen it abroad, the arrival of the lighter modern board, and eventually the wetsuit, to turn a known curiosity into something people here could and would do. British surfing didn't wait on a lack of imagination; it waited on the technology and the contact that made cold-water surfing practical. The waves had always been there. We just needed the boards, the suits, and the right people to show us how. So rather than crown a single winner, let's walk through the real milestones in turn, because each is a lovely story in its own right.

The Hawaiian princes who surfed the North Sea (1890)

The earliest written record of surfing in Britain is also one of its most surprising, and it didn't happen on a warm Cornish beach but in the cold North Sea off Yorkshire.

In September 1890, two Hawaiian princes, Jonah Kūhiō Kalanianaʻole and his brother David Kawānanakoa, were studying in England, and while staying at Bridlington they went surfing. We know this because of a letter, written by Prince Kūhiō and dated the 22nd of September 1890, which was discovered in the archives of the Bishop Museum in Honolulu by the historian Sandra Kimberley Hall in 2011. In it he writes, with what reads like genuine delight, "We enjoy the seaside very much and are out swimming every day, we like the sea to be rough so that we are able to have surf riding." They were accompanied by their English guardian, believed to be John Wrightson, who is sometimes credited as the first Briton to surf, though the evidence only tells us the party went surf-riding together.

It's the earliest written record of surfing in this country, and it's genuinely thrilling that it happened in the North Sea off a Yorkshire resort. But it's worth being honest about what it was: a one-off, by visiting Hawaiian royalty on holiday, not the start of a continuous British surf culture. The same princes are credited with surfing in Santa Cruz, California, in 1885, so Bridlington wasn't even their first surf spot. Calling Bridlington "the birthplace of British surfing," as you'll sometimes see, rather overstates a wonderful but isolated afternoon. Still, as the first time surfing is recorded on these shores, it deserves its place at the front of the story, and there's a pleasing symmetry that the earliest British surfing happened on the same cold North Sea coast where so many hardy British surfers ride today.

Britons abroad: a prince and a crime writer

Before surfing properly took root at home, a couple of famous Britons learned it overseas, and their stories are too good to skip.

In April 1920, Edward, Prince of Wales, the future King Edward VIII who would later abdicate to marry Wallis Simpson, learned to surf at Waikiki during a royal tour, taught by none other than Duke Kahanamoku, the Hawaiian Olympic swimmer who did more than anyone to spread surfing to the world. The Prince started in an outrigger canoe and progressed to a board, and The Times reported that he "revelled in the new sport." The Museum of British Surfing holds a photograph from the trip that's described as possibly the first image of a Briton standing on a wave, a lovely claim, though it's best treated as "described as" rather than hard fact.

Two years later came a more endearing story still. In 1922, the crime novelist Agatha Christie went surfing during a round-the-world Empire tour with her first husband. The dates get muddled in casual retellings, so to be precise: in February 1922 she first rode prone on a wooden board at Muizenberg in South Africa, and by August 1922 she had progressed to standing up on the big finless boards at Waikiki. Her own account of it is pure joy: "Oh, it was heaven! Nothing like it. Nothing like that rushing through the water at what seemed to you a speed of about two hundred miles an hour, one of the most perfect physical pleasures I have known." The founder of the Museum of British Surfing suggests she and her husband may have been among the very first Britons to learn to surf standing up, and she's rightly celebrated as one of Britain's earliest surfers. It's a delight to think of the queen of the murder mystery as a pioneering British surf girl.

These stories of Britons surfing abroad matter to the wider history because they show how the sport actually reached us: not as a deliberate import but as something adventurous Britons stumbled upon on their travels around an empire that happened to include some of the best waves on earth, and brought home as an enthusiasm. Surfing arrived in Britain the way so many things did, in the luggage and the memories of people who'd seen it somewhere warmer and couldn't forget the feeling.

The home-grown beginnings: bellyboards, coffin lids and a man on a train

Surfing of a sort had been quietly happening on British beaches since the Edwardian era, mostly prone bellyboarding rather than stand-up surfing, and this is where British surf culture genuinely begins to grow its own roots.

There are records of surfing, in the bellyboarding sense, in North Devon as early as 1904, including a photograph of a man named Hobart Braddick that's sometimes called the first British surfing photograph. Prone "surf-bathing" on short wooden boards became an established seaside pastime in Devon and Cornwall, and it got a real boost after the First World War, when soldiers returning from the trenches, some influenced by Australian and South African comrades, took to the waves in the West Country and the Channel Islands. Around 1920, surfers in Cornwall were photographed riding boards literally shaped like coffin lids, examples of which survive in the Museum of British Surfing. In 1928 the Australian champion Charles "Snowy" McAlister gave stand-up surfing demonstrations in Cornwall, showing Britons what the real thing looked like.

Then comes 1929 and one of the best stories in the whole history. Lewis Rosenberg, part of a close-knit group of friends from London who had been bellyboarding in the West Country and the Channel Islands for years, built his own wooden longboard, took it by steam train from London to Newquay, and stood up and rode it, an event captured on cine film and regarded as the earliest known footage of stand-up surfing in Britain. A Londoner, on a board he'd made himself, filmed standing up at Newquay: it's a wonderfully British origin story, and it's the strongest claim to home-grown stand-up surfing.

A few years later, in 1935, came the first genuinely modern board. Jimmy Dix, a dentist from Nuneaton, was gifted a roughly thirteen-foot hollow board, of the kind pioneered by the great American Tom Blake, by Duke Kahanamoku himself, and brought it to Newquay. He's often credited as the first person to ride a "real" Hawaiian-style board in Britain, a claim that sits alongside, rather than against, Rosenberg's 1929 home-built effort. After the war, a Newquay ice-cream seller named Pip Stafferi built himself a copy of Dix's board and learned to ride it, becoming a local celebrity. Piece by piece, board by board, surfing was taking root.

What's striking about this pre-boom era is how amateur and improvised it all was. There was no surf industry, no instruction, no wetsuits worth the name; there were just a few enthusiasts who'd seen surfing abroad or in a film, built or borrowed a board, and worked it out for themselves in cold water in woollen jumpers. They were eccentrics in the truest sense, doing something nobody around them understood, for no reason other than the joy of it. That do-it-yourself spirit, building your own board, teaching yourself, making your own kit, would define British surfing for decades and arguably still does, and it's the same spirit that runs through the self-build campervan scene today. British surfing didn't arrive as a finished product; it was hand-made, slowly, by people who simply refused to accept that you couldn't surf here.

Jersey, and Britain's first surf club (1923)

If Newquay has the best film and Bridlington the earliest record, Jersey has the strongest claim to the first organised British surfing, and it's a claim that often gets overlooked by the mainland.

Nigel Oxenden, a Jerseyman and a veteran of the Great War, learned to surf during post-war travels to South Africa, Australia and Hawaii. Returning home, he made his own wooden boards and surfed St Ouen's Bay, and in 1923 he and his friends founded the Island Surf Club of Jersey, which is Britain's first surf club and a serious contender for the oldest in all of Europe. The early Jersey surfers were bellyboarders, and Oxenden was making balsawood boards with painted heraldic designs and rope leashes by the 1930s.

This matters for the "who was first" question, because Jersey's 1923 club predates the Cornish club movement by almost forty years. When you see Cornwall's Cornwall Surf Club, founded in 1960, described as the oldest in Britain, that's really the oldest on the British mainland; the Channel Islands got there first. Jersey's deep, early surf heritage is one of the loveliest and least-known threads in the whole story, and the island still celebrates it.

The boom: when Australia brought the boards (1962)

For all those early stirrings, British surfing as a real, growing sport has a clear ignition point, and it's April 1962.

That month, four young Australian lifeguards, Bob Head, Ian Tiley, John Campbell and Warren Mitchell, arrived in Newquay to patrol the beaches, and they brought with them lightweight fibreglass "Malibu" surfboards, a whole generation ahead of the heavy wooden bellyboards Britons had been riding. Suddenly locals could see what a modern board could do, and travelling Australian, South African and American surfers became the gurus who taught the British by example. It's no exaggeration to say these four lifeguards turned Newquay into the epicentre of a national craze.

The man who turned that craze into an industry was Bill Bailey, often called the father of British surfing. A former RAF engineer who became a Newquay lifeguard at the end of the 1950s, Bailey famously lived in a yellow Ford van on Great Western Beach, and in the early 1960s, after buying a foam-core board from a visiting Californian, he started building surfboards himself, the first made in Britain. In 1965 he partnered with the Australian Bob Head, one of those 1962 lifeguards, to form a company trading as Bilbo, the name a nod to Bill and Bob, which became the biggest British surf brand of its era and produced something like twelve thousand boards. British board-building had begun, fittingly, in lock-ups and from the back of a van.

As the sport grew, it organised. In 1966 the British Surfing Association was formed as the national governing body, partly, tellingly, to fight the municipal rules that some councils were bringing in to restrict or ban surfing on their beaches. The same year, Rod Sumpter arrived in Newquay and became Britain's first true surfing professional. Within just a few years, Britain had gone from a handful of eccentrics on home-made boards to a sport with a foam-board industry, a governing body and its first stars.

Bilbo itself became a phenomenon, opening a shop by Newquay's railway station and shipping boards all over the country, and for a while in the late sixties and early seventies British board-building genuinely thrived, with other makers springing up in Cornwall and beyond. The fact that the British Surfing Association formed partly to fight beach bans tells you something important about the era, too: surfing was new and slightly suspect, councils weren't sure what to make of these long-haired figures riding waves where people swam, and the surfers had to organise simply to defend their right to be in the water. From those slightly embattled beginnings grew the confident, mainstream sport of today, but the rebellious, outsider streak never entirely went away, and it's part of why surfing and the free-spirited van life have always fit so naturally together.

A tour of British surf: the regional heartlands

British surfing is best understood as a map, because each region developed its own scene, its own breaks and its own character. Here's the tour.

Cornwall is the undisputed cradle. Newquay, with its west-facing Fistral Beach and the big-wave Cribbar reef, became the capital, home of the first surf shop (in St Ives, in 1963), the Cornwall Surf Club, the competition scene, and now the Boardmasters festival. The historian Roger Mansfield even coined the nickname "Surf City" for Newquay in a 1983 article. If British surfing has a spiritual home, it's here. To walk through Newquay in summer is to see the whole culture compressed into a few streets: surf shops on every corner, boards strapped to every other car, wetsuits drying on balconies, and a steady migration of vans heading for Fistral and Watergate Bay. It can feel commercialised now, and longtime locals will tell you it's lost some of its soul to stag dos and surf schools, but the waves that started it all are still there, and on a clean autumn swell with the crowds gone, Fistral reminds you exactly why four Australians decided this was the place. Beyond Newquay, Cornwall hides dozens of quieter spots, from the gentle beach breaks of the north coast to the heavy, expert-only reefs that only locals will name, and it's this range, beginner sand to serious reef within a few miles, that makes Cornwall the complete British surf county.

Devon is the other historic heartland, with North Devon's surfing records going back to 1904, the powerful beach break at Croyde, the long, forgiving sands of Woolacombe, and the premier South Devon break at Bantham. It's also home to the Museum of British Surfing in Braunton, the keeper of this whole history. Devon's surf has a gentler, more family-friendly reputation than Cornwall's heavier reefs, which makes it many a British surfer's first experience of the sport, the wide forgiving sands of Woolacombe and Saunton where countless people have stood up for the first time. But it has bite when it wants it, Croyde in particular can throw up fast, hollow, punishing waves on the right swell, and the county's long surfing pedigree, stretching back to those 1904 bellyboarders, means it's every bit as much a part of the origin story as its more famous neighbour to the west.

Wales found surfing in the early 1960s, concentrated at first on the Gower Peninsula, at Langland, Caswell and Llangennith, which remain the Welsh heartland. The scene took off around 1967 when the Australian champion Keith Paul rode a big swell at Langland, and the Welsh Surfing Federation formed in 1973. Wales produced real talent, from the early European competitor Pete Jones to Carwyn Williams, who helped open the world tour to Europeans, and Pembrokeshire, with breaks like Freshwater West, is the other great Welsh surf region, wilder and more remote than the Gower, with a rugged, west-facing coast that catches plenty of Atlantic swell. Welsh surfing has always had to share its water with the weather, and its scene is correspondingly tough and self-reliant, but the Gower in particular, Britain's first designated Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty, is one of the loveliest places to surf anywhere in the country. Add the inland novelty of the Snowdonia wave pool and Wales offers a surprising range, from world-class natural beauty to engineered certainty.

Scotland is the cold-water heartland, and its crown jewel is Thurso East, in the far north of Caithness, a world-class right-hand reef break that peels over flagstone reef into genuinely Arctic water. It was discovered by surfers in the early-to-mid 1970s, with several people, including the New Zealander Bob Treeby and the Englishman Paul Gill, credited in the telling, and the Scottish Surfing Federation formed in 1975. When the O'Neill Cold Water Classic came to Thurso in 2006, it announced Scotland to the surfing world as a serious, if punishing, destination. And punishing is the word: surfing Thurso means pulling on a thick winter wetsuit, boots, gloves and a hood, paddling out into water that can sit a few degrees above freezing, with the wind howling off the North Atlantic and the days painfully short. It is the polar opposite of the Hawaiian dream surfing was born from, and that's precisely the appeal for the hardy few who make the pilgrimage north. Scotland's surf scene is small, tight-knit and gloriously uncrowded by Cornish standards, scattered across the far north coast, the Outer Hebrides and pockets of the east. If Cornwall is where British surfing is easiest, Scotland is where it's hardest, and to a certain kind of surfer that makes it the best.

And the North-East and Yorkshire complete the picture, with their own hardy scenes. Surfers have ridden Saltburn since the early 1960s; Tynemouth's Longsands has become, in recent years, one of the busiest surf spots in the country, the epicentre of North-East surfing; and Cayton Bay near Scarborough is Yorkshire's best-known break. There's a neat full circle here: the earliest recorded British surfing, back in 1890, was on the cold North Sea coast of Yorkshire, and the cold North Sea is exactly where some of the most committed British surfing still happens today. The North-East scene has its own character, less holiday glamour, more hardy locals surfing before and after work in some of the coldest, most industrial-edged surroundings in the country, and there's a real romance to a dawn session at Tynemouth with the priory on the headland and the North Sea doing its worst. Saltburn, with its Victorian pier, has a surf community going back to the early sixties, and the whole stretch from Yorkshire up through Northumberland rewards those willing to chase it. It's surfing stripped of any pretension, done for the pure love of it in conditions most of the world would consider unsurfable, which is about as British as the sport gets.

Staying warm: the British wetsuit and the cold-water identity

You cannot tell the story of British surfing without the wetsuit, because without it, surfing our coast all year would simply be impossible. And here Britain didn't just import the sport; it innovated the gear that made the sport survivable.

The key name is Gul, founded in Cornwall in 1967 by Dennis Cross, a surfer who found the winter Atlantic too cold to bear and decided to do something about it. Gul made the UK's first purpose-built surfing wetsuits, and the founding legend, treat it as cherished folklore rather than documented fact, is that the first suits were stitched in the back of Cross's split-screen VW camper at Fistral Beach. By the early 1970s Gul had created the one-piece "Steamer," named for the steam that rises off the suit when you peel it off on a freezing day, and the company remains Britain's biggest watersports apparel name. There's a lovely lineage here too: C-Skins, the respected modern Cornish wetsuit brand founded in 1997, was started by Cross's nephew, who learned the craft from his uncle, so there's a direct family line from the very first British wetsuits to one of the best modern ones.

This gear is the technological backbone of what makes British surfing distinctive: a cold-water identity. Where Californian surfing is about sun and neon, British surfing is about hardiness, grey Atlantic points and North Sea beach breaks, surfed year-round in a thick wetsuit, boots and gloves, and a flask of something hot waiting in the van. It's a quieter, tougher, more understated kind of surfing, and British surfers are rather proud of it. The American brand O'Neill, which did so much to make cold-water surfing possible worldwide, recognised this when it brought its Cold Water Classic to Thurso, but the identity itself is home-grown, built on British wetsuits and British grit.

It's worth appreciating just how much the wetsuit changed things. Before it, British surfing was a brief summer pursuit, painful and short; after it, the season stretched to the whole year, and the best British waves, which often arrive with the autumn and winter storms, became surfable. The wetsuit didn't just keep surfers warm; it unlocked the coast. It also created an entire British industry, not just suits but boots, gloves, hoods, and now the ubiquitous changing robe, that the warm-water nations never needed, and it made surfing here a test of commitment as much as skill. There's a quiet pride in being the person still paddling out at a deserted beach on a grey December morning, and that pride, more than any single wave, is the real heart of British surf culture.

The modern scene: museums, pros and wave pools

British surfing today is a mature, year-round culture with its own institutions, its own heroes and, remarkably, its own inland waves.

The history is kept at the Museum of British Surfing in Braunton, North Devon, founded as a non-profit in 2003 by the journalist and surf historian Pete Robinson and opened in its permanent home, a former railway goods shed, in 2012. It holds the coffin-lid boards, the Agatha Christie and Prince of Wales material and the documented timeline that underpins much of this article, and it's the single best place to encounter the story in person. Surf tourism, meanwhile, underpins the economies of Newquay, North Devon, the Gower, Pembrokeshire and increasingly Scotland and the North-East, with the Boardmasters festival at Fistral and Watergate Bay the biggest celebration of it. British surfers have reached the top, too: Russell Winter became the first Briton to qualify for surfing's elite world championship tour, a milestone that marked the sport here coming of age.

Most strikingly, surfing in Britain has gone inland. Surf Snowdonia, in North Wales, opened on the 1st of August 2015 as the world's first public Wavegarden lagoon, an artificial surf wave in a Welsh valley, later rebranded Adventure Parc Snowdonia, though its surf lagoon closed in 2023 after the wave machine failed. The Wave, near Bristol, opened in 2019 using the next-generation Wavegarden Cove technology, bringing consistent surfable waves to within reach of millions far from any coast, though wave pools have proved commercially fragile and it's worth checking the current status of any of them before you plan a trip. These pools are a genuinely new chapter, democratising a sport that for a century needed you to live near, or drive a very long way to, the sea.

Whether the wave pools survive commercially is genuinely uncertain, Surf Snowdonia's closure shows how fragile the economics are, but the principle they proved matters: a consistent, rideable wave can be made far from any coast, which could one day bring surfing to people in the Midlands or the North who'd otherwise never try it. For now, though, the real British surf experience remains what it always was, checking the forecast, loading the van, and driving to the coast in hope, and that uncertainty, the not-knowing whether the waves will be any good when you arrive, is part of what makes a good day so precious. The wave pool gives you certainty; the British coast gives you the gamble, and most British surfers, if they're honest, still prefer the gamble.

The van and the wave: a British love story

There's one more thread running through all of this, and for anyone reading on a campervan site it's the best one: the van and the surfboard have been companions in Britain almost from the start.

The VW campervan, sketched out in the late 1940s and in production from 1950, was adopted by surfers in 1950s and 60s California for the simplest of reasons, it was the perfect size to carry boards and mates and double as a place to sleep by the beach, and the culture crossed the Atlantic with the sport. In Britain it found its natural home on exactly the coasts where surfing took root, and the image of a VW camper with boards on the roof, parked above a Cornish beach, became the visual shorthand for British surf culture, leaned on by every brochure and advert for sixty years.

But it's more than an image. Remember that the people who actually built British surfing did it from vans. Bill Bailey lived in his yellow Ford van on Great Western Beach while he pioneered British board-building. Gul's first wetsuits were, by fond tradition, sewn in the back of a VW camper at Fistral. For the British surfer, the van has never just been transport; it's been the workshop, the changing room, the bedroom and the kettle, the thing that makes it possible to chase a cold dawn swell two hundred miles up the coast and still have somewhere warm to come back to. The surf-and-van life isn't a marketing invention here. It's how British surfing was literally made.

There's a reason the two cultures fit so naturally. Surfing depends on chasing conditions, the right swell, the right wind, the right tide, often a long way from home and at unsociable hours, and the van is the tool that makes that chase possible and bearable. It carries the boards, it gives you somewhere to sleep so you're there for the dawn, it's a warm dry box to peel a freezing wetsuit off in, and it asks for nothing in return but a tank of fuel and somewhere to park. For generations of British surfers the van hasn't been a lifestyle accessory; it's been essential equipment, as fundamental as the board and the wetsuit. The boards have changed and the wetsuits have got warmer, but the van parked above the beach with steam rising off a flask is the one constant of British surf life.

If you want to go deeper into the boards themselves, our history of the first surfboards and who invented surfing traces the whole lineage, and for the culture that grew up around it, our look at vintage surf brands and their logos is a nostalgic companion.

Frequently asked questions

Where did surfing start in Britain?

There's no single answer, because different "firsts" measure different things. The earliest recorded surfing in Britain was at Bridlington, Yorkshire, in 1890 (by visiting Hawaiian princes). The first British surf club was founded in Jersey in 1923. The earliest home-grown stand-up surfing captured on film was at Newquay in 1929. And the modern sport really took off when Australian lifeguards brought foam boards to Newquay in 1962.

Who first surfed in Britain?

The first recorded surfers in Britain were the Hawaiian princes Jonah Kūhiō Kalanianaʻole and David Kawānanakoa, with their English tutor, at Bridlington in 1890. The earliest documented home-grown British stand-up surfer is usually said to be Lewis Rosenberg, who built his own board and was filmed riding it at Newquay in 1929.

Why is Newquay the home of British surfing?

Newquay, in Cornwall, has the consistent west-facing surf of Fistral Beach, became the landing point for the Australian lifeguards who sparked the 1962 boom, and was where Britain's first foam-board industry (Bilbo Surfboards) and much of its early competition scene grew up. It's been the centre of UK surfing for over sixty years.

When did people start surfing in cold British water year-round?

That became practical once British wetsuits arrived. Gul, founded in Cornwall in 1967, made the UK's first purpose-built surfing wetsuits, and the development of suits, boots and gloves through the following decades created Britain's distinctive year-round, cold-water surfing culture.

Did Agatha Christie really surf?

Yes. The crime novelist learned to surf in 1922 during a round-the-world tour, first riding prone in South Africa and then standing up at Waikiki in Hawaii. She wrote rapturously about it, calling it "one of the most perfect physical pleasures I have known," and is celebrated as one of Britain's earliest surfers.

Can you surf inland in Britain now?

Yes. Artificial wave pools have brought surfing inland: Surf Snowdonia in North Wales opened in 2015 as the world's first public Wavegarden lagoon, and The Wave near Bristol opened in 2019 with newer technology. Wave pools can be commercially fragile, though, so check a venue's current status before travelling.

What's the oldest surf club in Britain?

The Island Surf Club of Jersey, founded by Nigel Oxenden in 1923, is Britain's first surf club and one of the oldest in Europe. On the British mainland, Cornwall's Cornwall Surf Club (1960) is often cited as the oldest, but the Channel Islands got there nearly four decades earlier.

Who brought modern surfboards to Britain?

Four Australian lifeguards, Bob Head, Ian Tiley, John Campbell and Warren Mitchell, brought lightweight fibreglass "Malibu" foam boards to Newquay in April 1962, which sparked the modern British surf boom. The first surfboards actually made in Britain were built shortly afterwards by Bill Bailey, leading to the Bilbo brand in 1965.

Where is the best cold-water surfing in Britain?

Scotland's far north coast, above all Thurso East in Caithness, is Britain's most celebrated cold-water surf, a world-class reef break in near-freezing water. The North-East of England, around Tynemouth and Saltburn, and the wider Scottish and northern coastline offer serious, uncrowded cold-water surfing for anyone prepared for the temperatures.

The reachable bit

British surfing was built by people with very little money and a great deal of determination, lifeguards living in vans, a dentist with a borrowed board, a man who sewed wetsuits in his camper because the sea was too cold to enjoy otherwise. The coast, and the freedom to reach it, was the whole point, and it was open to anyone hardy enough to paddle out. That spirit is exactly why Campervan.win runs the way it does, with capped entries so the odds stay honest, every cost published down to the line, £500 to a UK charity from every full draw, and a winner who drives away in a real van. The British coast belongs to everyone. Getting there, and having somewhere warm to change afterwards, shouldn't only be for the few.