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IN SEARCH OF ENGLAND
This article first appeared in 'Trip-Surf' magazine, in 2004
For pictures of this trip, CLICK HERE. (opens in a new window)


What is England? Cucumber sandwiches and games of cricket on the village green or state of the art nightclubs with superstar DJ’s? And the symbol of England? Is it the glittering pomp of Royalty or a football star who has become a bigger icon than God?

If you want the answer then don’t ask me. I’m English and, like my neighbours, I don’t know, because I, like all English, am going through an identity crisis. But what I can tell you is that England is no longer as big as it once was. England is no longer Britain and Britain no longer means all things English. In all truth it never has done, it’s just that we English forgot. Now though, the Welsh, Scottish and Irish have reminded us and finally they have gained the independence from London that they’ve waited so long for. I can also tell you something else about England and that is that it doesn’t have cucumber sandwiches and games of cricket on the village green, but it does have waves and of more variety than you maybe ever knew.

Well, actually if you’ve been surfing long enough then maybe you do know. Maybe you can recall those past glory days of Empire when England, and Cornwall in particular, was at the head of Empire, not Queen Victoria’s Empire, but the Empire of European surfing and the centre of it all, the self styled Buckingham Palace of surfing, was and still remains, Newquay, a small town on the north Cornish coast and the place where we will begin our journey in search of England. Once it was nothing more than an insignificant fishing village, but on a fateful April morning in 1962 a group of Australian lifeguards working for the season in Cornwall became the first to paddle out through the white water of one of Newquay’s town beaches and ride into the history books of English surfing. From that moment on surfing exploded in the English psyche and
Newquay became synonymous with this new lifestyle. Today the town relies so heavily on its surf city image that the tourist board have even rather optimistically blessed the town with the title of the ‘Home of Europe’s finest surfing beaches’. For various economic reasons the Empire of sun and surf has today fallen to France, but as an act of marketing genius Newquay tourist boards creative optimism has brought Newquay, and surfing, squarely into the mainstream and nowadays anyone from Liverpool whose ever watched Blue Juice or Point Break dreams of Newquay and living the surfers life. And good luck to them, they’re going to need it if they’re going to survive, because, thanks to surfing and its associated summer lifestyle Newquay tourist board could equally have named the town ‘England’s city of sin’. If you think Hossegor, Bondi or Huntington is bad then nothing can prepare you for Newquay. No one here has ever heard of the English stiff upper lip and if, in the past, one of the greatest mysteries of the world was how, with their strange 18th century attitudes towards sex, the English actually managed to reproduce, then no ones remembering that in today’s Newquay.

With so much going on in the towns bars every summer night it might come as a surprise to find out that by the following morning people still have the energy left to surf. Throughout the summer they descend on Fistral Beach, the best known surf spot in England, in their thousands, quickly turning the water into little more than a slick of neoprene and fibreglass as every type of wave riding craft imaginable piles into the sea. There are longboards, canoes, airbeds, boogie boards, rubber dinghies and
perfect replicas of the boards Slater rides at Pipe. Everyone wants to be a pro, except, of course, for the lifeguards, who, whether male or female, are too busy puffing out their chests and practising their Ozzy accents to take much notice of the show going on around them. It is, quite frankly, utter carnage. Fortunately for everyone’s own safety, with almost no surf at this time of the year people tend to do little more than just float around rather than ride waves. But it’s the summer in Newquay and as long as you look cool doing it, then that’s all that matters.

If, for some reason, this doesn’t sound like your cup of tea, then you’re better off coming to Newquay in the winter, as, from October through to May, Newquay actually does become the sort of town a surfer may want to stay in. Despite all the hype, despite the tourist boards over the top claims, Fistral Beach actually is one of the better beachbreaks in England and a half an hour drive north or south can reveal dozens of other beaches, reefs and points, all of which, throughout the long winter, dish up the goods. All of these waves have their own devoted local crews and almost all of them do everything they can to disassociate themselves with the summertime madness of the ‘City of Sin and Surf’.

There is of course far more to England and English surfing than Cornwall. Some of it fits the clichés, the coves and the little fishing villages where life centres around the pub and surfing is the low key activity that you’d expect in a country that spends most of its time drowning under rainfall and battening the hatches down from the strong winds. Other aspects of English surfing though are so unlikely that they are nothing short of miraculous. And our next destination is one of them.

London, the biggest city in Europe, centre of what was once the greatest Empire the world has ever seen, is known for many things. Surfing though, is not one of them. Or is it? Just an hour’s train ride from the city centre is Brighton, England’s oldest and most infamous seaside resort. Newquay may have a reputation for sin, but the crazy Cornish town is little more than the young pretender, because after all, Brighton invented sin. And it continues to live up to its sinful past, and is today maybe the perfect image of modern England. Brighton is a twisted fantasy of tacky decay and enviable sophistication, red and white striped deckchairs line the pebbly beach and jutting out to sea, festooned in bright lights, arcade games and kiss me quick hats is the Palace Pier and the now fire destroyed West Pier. All your ideas of a classic English seaside resort are alive and kicking in Brighton, but sitting comfortably beside them are all of young, cosmopolitan England’s ideas of the future, because Brighton, alongside London, is the beating heart of maybe the most dynamic youth culture in the world. The party capital of the country, the place from which every bar and club in the land takes its marching orders and the home and inspiration to some of the biggest musicians, DJ’s and trend setters in the game. Brighton may not be pretty, but it knows how to have fun. And strangely, considering its location, shoved halfway up the shallow and sheltered English Channel, some of its residents also know how to have fun in the surf. The idea was born in Newquay, but it has radiated across almost every centimetre of the nations coastline and given birth to healthy communities of dedicated and independently minded surfers everywhere it has gone, but of all the scenes it has created it is Brighton that has emerged as, if not the most hardcore, certainly the most surreal. Step off the train, head south, away from the station, walk past the oriental extravagance that is the Royal Pavilion and on towards the beach. Finally, there it is in-front of you, a surf scene the likes of which most of us are unlikely to have ever experienced and, in all honesty, are probably very glad we’ve never experienced. The water is brown and the
pollution a genuine health risk. In fact, when I spoke to the manager of one of the towns surf shops, he told me that the first few times that someone braves Brighton’s waves they are guaranteed to be sick, often violently. And the waves? Well, lets just say that it’s not Indonesia, in fact it’s not even Cornwall, but throughout the winter a steady flow of painfully weak and sloppy waves roll past the piers and flop down onto the pebbles of the beach carrying with them, ever so slowly, surfers, wearing huge grins for their friends but heavy vibes for the occasional outsider who dares to challenge the surf of Brighton. It is, I have to admit, a strange concept, one of the most unlikely surf spots in the world happens to have some of the worst localism in the country. Maybe it’s a London thing, the non-stop stress of living life in the fast lane doesn’t have time to wear off during the short train ride from the capital and so tempers remain strained in the water. Or maybe it’s something deeper; maybe it’s an English thing? After all, across all of Europe, the English have an unenviable reputation for aggression - just think of our football fans. We can be violently nationalistic in the name of a country that a few years ago most of us would have confused with Britain as a whole. And it seems that we can be equally aggressive over something as unimportant as a sloppy brown wave that few others would care for anyway. However if you’re after the ultimate in bizarre surfing experiences then the next time a westerly gale moves up the English Channel jump straight on the train and head to the piers of Brighton.

So if Newquay is the birthplace and Brighton the surreal heart. Then where do the hardcore hide? Well, as you’ve probably already guessed, it’s not a place that immediately springs to mind when the word surfing is mentioned, but maybe it should, because without it surfing today could be a very different ball game. Right at the top of England, close to the border of Scotland, is Newcastle, home of a black and white striped football team and an accent that’s incomprehensible to almost everyone else. Geordie (as people from Newcastle are known) surfers have the sea and the surf in their blood. After all, they produced Captain Cook and, in-directly, he has made you a surfer and in the process probably changed your life. Captain Cook learnt his trade a short way to the south of Newcastle, in Whitby, a small fishing town of red brick houses. And it was here that his ship, the Endeavour, was built, the ship that eventually took him to Hawaii and the first western contact with surfing, a sport that back then truly was the sport of Kings. Whitby, much like Newquay and Brighton is another one of those terribly old fashioned seaside resorts that, lets face it, no-one else but the English, could or more to the point, want, to produce. It’s all fish and chip shops and Punch and Judy shows, but unlike its southern cousins it’s choosing to retain its traditional beachside
family fun image. There are no poseurs in big name surf brands with a completely inappropriate board under their arm strutting down the street here. In fact there are few outward signs at all of either the Californian desires of Newquay or young Brighton’s modern England. However Whitby hasn’t forgotten what its most famous son has given to the world. And, appropriately enough for a town that was the launch pad for what has to have been the most epic surf trip of all time, the surfers of Whitby and Newcastle are as hardcore as they come. How hardcore? Well, one of them once told me how, in the dead of winter, when much of Newcastle is sensibly either at a football match or keeping warm in some of the most characterful pubs in England, they head to the very northern tip of Scotland to go surfing. Why? Because northern Scotland in the winter is warmer than the frigid North Sea waves of Newcastle and Whitby! Surfing on a snow cloaked beach here is as common as a Fat Boy Slim pretender in Brighton, but if you’re in England and you’re serious about your waves then forget Newquay and just shake your head in disbelief at Brighton, because in all truth the icy north east is the home of England’s best waves and some of its most successful surfers.

Throughout the year low pressures steam across the top of Scotland, producing giant swells that, after battering that country’s coast, continue to roll down the North Sea before finally making impact with one of the flat, kelp covered reefs around Newcastle and Whitby. And to add to the Geordie surfers joy, the wind blows predominately from the southwest, which is offshore. The results are thick, brown, ice-cold barrels, the best of which are to be found just outside Whitby. Did Captain Cook have any idea what he was sailing past when he set off to discover surfing? Well if he didn’t, then two of England’s best known surfers do, Gabe Davies is busy following in Cook’s footsteps by scouring the globe for new waves, whilst his friend and fellow pro, Sam Lamiroy, has chosen to see the wider world by taking the contest route.

These two are just like many other hardcore English surfers, abroad more than they are at home, helping to cement a reputation as European surfing’s most devoted travellers, but like almost all of us, they return enough to keep their roots firmly planted in England. With the cold of Newcastle, the circus of Newquay and the tack of Brighton you may wonder why, but the question is also the answer. It is because we are English, even if we cannot remember how to make a proper cup of tea and even if we don’t recall the words of the National Anthem and even if we couldn’t tell you for sure when St Georges Day is. But, quite frankly we don’t care, because Britain has fallen down, its glory days are done and the British are being left to look over their shoulders and dream of Empire, but we’re not British, because Britain no longer exists. Instead we have searched for something new and we have discovered something forgotten. It doesn’t have cucumber sandwiches and games of cricket on the village green but it does have nightclubs with superstar DJ’s and it even has a city of sin and a city of surf. We are British and we have finally discovered England and the English have discovered surfing. That is why we will return to the cold of Newcastle, the circus of Newquay and the tack of Brighton.

Thanks to Brighton based surf site www.sharkbait.co.uk for the use of some of their pics.