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Aloha!  Welcome to The Surfing Museum, dedicated to capturing the soul of British surfing, celebrating its rich and diverse culture, preserving its heritage. For the first time in the UK, our sport now has a national focal point for its history. We’re creating a living museum on Brighton beach on the south coast of England that will be a vibrant social meeting place, educational, interactive and environmentally aware. The Surfing Museum will draw upon an extensive and historically significant collection of surfboards, literature and memorabilia. Most importantly it’s a museum being built by you, the British surfer. Mahalo!

The Surfing Museum will be opening as a key part of the £30 million restoration of Brighton’s historic West Pier, which is due for completion in 2005. Our galleries will be right on the beach, in touching distance of the surf. We will have regular updates here on www.thesurfingmuseum.co.uk with news about our building, the latest on our ever-expanding collection, plus details about events and exhibitions.

Britain’s links with surfing date back hundreds of years to the time when Captain James Cook first stumbled across our beautiful sport in Hawaii in the 18th Century. People have been riding waves for fun here in the British Isles for almost 100 years. Here you’ll find a brief history, interviews with pioneer surfers and images of just a small part of our collection. We need you to get involved. If you’ve got a story to tell let us know (whether your grandfather surfed in the 1920s, or you’re a recent ‘champion’). We’re always looking for interesting pieces of British surfing history – an old wooden board, a discarded wetsuit or maybe just some personal photos or film – please get in touch! It’s your museum. Documenting life now and the long and winding path that led us all to the waves.

The Surfing Museum will be having regular events and exhibitions, here on the website and all around the UK. Our exhibition space is there to encourage British surfing art to flourish – please email us at info@thesurfingmuseum if you have some work you’d like us to display. It will also allow us to give more space to historical collections that come in to the museum, and that’s where we start with our inaugural show. We hope you’ll enjoy the story and photos donated by Mike Ball, a teacher from Herefordshire. He grew up in the landlocked Midlands of England more than 100 miles from the sea – but in the 1960s he lived the dream and became a surfer..

Coming soon

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