NICK HOUNSFIELD, FOUNDER OF
THE WAVE, PHOTOGRAPHED AT THE
WAVE’S “COVE” IN BRISTOL128It was the mid-1970s, and surfing,
thanks to the nascent commercial-
isation of the sport in California and
Australia, was beginning to acquire
a serious following in Britain. Brian,
an osteopath and sailing enthusiast
who, as Hounsfield remembers, always
“liked to be part of the next new exciting
thing”, tried to teach himself to surf.
Unfortunately, he wasn’t very good.
(“Dreadful, in fact! Though he had fun,
which is what mattered.”) Instead,
he took to putting young Nick on the
board, and pushing him into the waves.
And Nick, it turned out, was a natural.
On holidays, and trips to the coast
from their home in Surrey, the father
watched as his son surfed for hours. “It
was meditative,” Hounsfield recalls,
sitting at the kitchen table of his family
home in Bristol, every inch the classic
surf dude with his plaid shirt, bare
feet and tousled beach-blonde hair.
“It still is. I feel the mental health benefits
more than the physical. It comes from
having a sense of space with pockets of
excitement from the waves; the calm
between those waves is just as important
as the surfing itself.”
It was a feeling he shared with his
father, and they enjoyed sailing, surfing
and swimming together into adult life.
Nick trained to become an osteopath too,
eventually sharing a practice with Brian.
Both took an interest in the relationshipONEWHENNICK HOUNSFIELDWASFIVE YEARSOLD, HISFATHER, BRIAN,BOUGHTA SURFBOARD.between stress and physical health,
and of the positive impact on health of
spending time in and near the sea.
Early in his career, Nick noticed
that many clients suffering muscular
problems were inhibited and anxious,
suffering from constant low-level stress
that drip-fed their bodies with adren-
aline. The adrenaline caused blood
vessels to constrict, reducing blood
supply to the muscles, in turn causing
stiffness and pain. In many cases, if he
invited clients to talk about the causes
of their stress, he would feel the tissues
softening under his hands as the client
relaxed, the adrenaline subsided and the
blood flow resumed. He became good
at getting clients to open up, and found
that giving some people permission to
relax and connect with another person
was almost sufficient treatment in itself.
In 2011, shortly after being diagnosed
with cancer at the age of 67, Brian died.
This hit Hounsfield hard. “I was being
struck by a sense of mortality really,”
he recalls. “Coming from a healthcare
background, I had this realisation
that a lot of people just weren’t happy,
and that it was affecting their health.
I could see that a lot of that was based
around anxieties, and my feeling
was that they weren’t getting out or
exercising enough, and weren’t commu-
nicating with each other very well.”
As his father lay dying, Hounsfield
promised him he would “do something
bold, something that would leave a
positive impact on the planet and
society”. After his father’s death, he
began to think about spaces where
different generations of people could
socialise freely. The best examples he
could think of were Mediterranean
beaches he had visited on holidays,
where he had watched 80-year-olds,
middle-aged parents, teenagers and
young children happily enjoying the
same space. “That was an ideal,” he
says. “But I had to ask myself: how can
we create that in Bristol?”
It might have remained an
unanswered question, but by chance
one evening that year, when he was up
late watching surf videos on YouTube,
he came across 30 seconds of grainy
footage of a small artificial surfing lake
being built in the mountains near San
Sebastián, in Spain’s Basque Country.
It was called Wavegarden. “I thought
straight away, the surfing could be a hook
to pull people in, and a space around
it could deliver the community,” he
says. A few weeks later he flew out to
Spain to meet the two brothers behind
Wavegarden. His new mission: to use
their technology to fulfil the promise
he had made to his father.‘Surfing is meditative.I feel the mentalhealth benefits morethan the physical.It comes from a senseof space, the calmbetween the waves’09-19-FTwave.indd 128 19/07/2019 19:12