The rebellious roots of Cornwall’s surfing scene

Britain is a country increasingly defined by its edges. “Rising sea levels” has become the shorthand phrase for the climate crisis. Small boats crossing the Channel have become political flashpoints. Coastal towns are plastered across glossy leaflets whilst struggling to stay afloat – all as we talk about “protecting our borders”. But for those who live on the shorelines of this political battleground, the ocean continues to represent a slower-paced way of life, an enveloping escape from the daily grind.

With the longest coastline of anywhere in the UK, nowhere feels this tension more than Cornwall. There’s a Cornish word, “mordros” – meaning “relentless sound of the sea” – and it’s this idea that is front and centre of the National Maritime Museum’s latest exhibition, Surf! An ode to 100 years of surf culture in the region, the ocean is the very first thing you experience upon entering: before a single surfboard is seen, the barrel of a life-sized wave is projected across a curved wall, providing a boards-eye view.

The exhibition is a dive into surfing’s rich culture – and there doesn’t seem to be a cultural item left untapped: Surf’s influence spans across fine art, the local craft of boardmaking, music, filmmaking, and glossy magazines plastered over the walls. Punctuating all of them are the boards themselves – lacquered monoliths that tower over walls and ceilings. The world’s longest surfboard hangs above at 37-foot long – a vast red oblong that spreads across the breadth of the artefacts.

Its curator, Dr. Sam Bleakley, was keen to tell the story of “100 years in 100 boards”, he says. The earliest, he shows me, is a wooden “coffinboard”, made by local coffin makers in the 1920s – which was ridden prone (belly down). As the decades progress, the boards get longer and shinier – as does the sheen of surf’s image. By the ’60s, headband-wearing wave-riders were grinning from the pages of surf magazines. Vintage posters with slogans like “Get your surf on!” cover the walls. Wetsuits become more skin tight. By the end of the decade, the sport was attracting thousands to the shores of Cornwall, which was becoming what the exhibition dubs the “California of the UK”.

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Bleakley, a European longboard champion and senior lecturer in cultural tourism at Falmouth University, was born and bred with the sea. He views surfing as a less confrontational way to bring light to some of our most urgent crises: “I like the way that the video clips interlink with the physical objects, to the narrative, to the smells, and the noises, so I really wanted it to be something that was deep enough to celebrate the people who’ve really done special things, but to also plant the seeds to think more sustainably, to be more ethical without being dogmatic,” he says.

This tension lies at the heart of surfing – much of the exhibition celebrates the “care-free spirit” of surfing, the idea, as Bleakley puts, we need to “reconnect with nature” and “go to the coast and play because we live a busy life”. But it was precisely this free-spirited image that gave the sport its edge – seen as a lifestyle for Californians, barefoot drifters, and countercultural creatives riding against the tide of convention. In the late ’60s, surfing was banned on some Cornish beaches, thought to attract the “wrong kind of tourist”. “It’s really important to recognise the tensions that activities create,” says Bleakley. “Some councils banned it because they thought it was bringing a bad element to the town, that it was dangerous. Those tensions led to the more politicised side of surfing.”

There’s an irony in beachside sports like surfing: the ocean, which gave the sport its characteristic “chill”, quickly became the epicentre of urgent conversations about the climate crisis. It was surfers who first noticed how much raw sewage floated around the UK’s coastline and protested, after they had to paddle through raw sewage in Newquay in 1966. By the ’90s, they had founded the campaign group Surfers Against Sewage, which continues to campaign for cleaner waters. “I like activism to be really driven from experience,” says Bleakley. “I’ve been a hard-hitting environmentalist throughout my life but in a much more subtle way, creative way.” The exhibition does not shy away from that message: a towering wave formed of discarded plastic bottles curls over the exhibits – casting the swimwear couture and glossy surf ephemera alongside that reminder of the sport’s activist undercurrent.

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Surfing now brings in over £150 million a year for Cornwall’s economy. But as it grows, it’s caught between its role as a lucrative tourist draw and its roots as a countercultural lifestyle. Since surfing became an Olympic sport in 2020, there are questions – much like BMX riding and skateboarding – about whether its spirit can really be measured in medals. The tussle for the soul of surfing plays out in many of the show’s artefacts: A film narrated in Cornish – a language now spoken by just 2,000 people – is a moving assertion of local identity. A modest swimsuit designed for hijab-wearers – by local brand Finisterre – challenges surfing’s traditionally white, middle-class image in the county. A display of para-surfing boards and surfboard-specific prosthetics nods to greater inclusion, despite the sport still not being included for the upcoming LA 2028 Paralympic games.

For Bleakley, the growth of surfing demands compromise: “Ever since the railways promoted surfing, they’ve used this kind of exotic image of the coast and the health benefits of the sea to sell holidays to Cornwall, but what we need to do is continue to make sure that the role of surfing in society is represented in a number of places, politically, socially,” he says. “Like any big movement, it takes management, it takes understanding, it takes differences of opinion coming together and finding solutions.”

It’s a philosophy very in keeping with the spirit of surfing: a laid-back genre of defiance, where rebellion plays out to the soothing thrum of ocean waves. Bleakley closes the exhibition with another series of surfing clips taken from inside the waves, which are projected across a large wall. “That’s my daughter Lola, who’s a champion surfer,” he says, pointing to one. “I want it to feel like you wanted to go out of the exhibition and get to the coast and just reconnect with nature. That needs to be the outcome.”

SURF! 100 Years of Waveriding in Cornwall is on view at the National Maritime Museum Cornwall until January 2027.

Ella Glossop is Huck’s social lead. Follow her on Bluesky.

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