This autumn Scotland will get its first artificial surfing wave, when the new Lost Shore resort opens in a former quarry at Ratho, just outside Edinburgh. With a price tag of £55 million, it will be the most expensive sports infrastructure project to be completed in the country for more than a decade. It’s also a development consisting of many different but complementary elements, so we’re exploring these in a four-part series. Last week’s first instalment, which is available to read here, was about the mechanics of the wave pool itself. This week we’re looking at the ways in which the new development will focus on the health benefits of surfing.

To understand the pivotal role that health will play at Lost Shore, it’s necessary to travel back in time to the spring of 2014, when a young surfer called Jamie Marshall had just become the Scottish co-ordinator for the Wave Project – a charity aiming to improve the mental health of young people through surf therapy. Following successful trials in Cornwall and Devon, the Wave Project was about to make its Scottish debut, and Marshall, working in conjunction with Coast to Coast surf school in Dunbar, had been charged with making it all run smoothly.

“That’s how I met Andy Hadden,” says Marshall, Hadden being the founder of Lost Shore. “I think he was on my second ever round of courses as a volunteer, and he was a bit nervous. He’d done all the training but this was going to be the first time he’d ever tried working with young people. I just said to him ‘Look, you love your surfing – just help this young person find that as well.’ We had this young girl with us who had been involved with the Wave Project for a while but hadn’t ever stood up on a board, but she stood up after about five minutes with Andy.”

Over the following decade, Marshall’s career in health science and the Lost Shore development have grown in tandem. In September 2022, Marshall completed the world’s first ever PhD in Surf Therapy at Edinburgh Napier University – funded by Lost Shore. And now, in addition to his role as a Research Fellow at Napier, Marshall has also taken on a part-time job as Lost Shore’s social and health innovation lead, with input into a range of related activities at the resort.

The Wave Project aims to improve the mental health and well-being of young people through surf therapy PIC: Courtesy of the Wave Project

Marshall quotes the official definition of surf therapy: “the use of surfing as a vehicle for delivering intentional, inclusive, population-specific, and evidenced-based therapeutic structures to promote psychological, physical, and psychosocial wellbeing.” It’s a bit of a mouthful, but the bit he really wants to highlight is the word “intentional”.

“Surfing isn’t a silver bullet that fixes everything,” he says, “but it can be an incredible vehicle for helping people, and I think that’s something Andy [Hadden] got very early on. He understood that just building a wave pool isn’t enough – we need to make sure we’re intentional with the structures around it.

“So, firstly, we’re going to have lots of surf therapy at Lost Shore. We’re going to have the Wave Project there from Day One, and we’re also partnering with Inclusive Surfing Scotland, who offer adaptive surfing for people with disabilities. For a family to book a disability surf session with us – we want that to feel as easy and as normal as anybody else booking a surf session.”

“In addition to all that, though, our aim is that everyone who visits us leaves feeling a little better than they did when they came. Obviously that makes commercial sense, but this is also where that point about surfing as a vehicle becomes really important. Surfing ‘in the wild’ has been shown at times to be incredibly exclusive and elitist, so at Lost Shore it’s up to us to address all the things around that to make sure it’s a really positive experience.”

Dr Jamie Marshall with his PhD on Surf Therapy from Edinburgh Napier University PIC: Courtesy of Lost Shore

To that end, Marshall explains that in addition to overseeing the surf therapy side of the business he has also been tasked with “jumping around all the different departments to make sure that that visitor experience is grounded in the latest scientific research.” Every member of staff, from baristas to lifeguards, will receive positive psychology training.

He has even had input into the health and wellbeing implications of the design of the site.

“In the wave pool world,” he says, “there’s a lot of talk about blue health – that is, people generally feeling better around water – but often it’s people talking about things that are incidental to their operations. We want to be intentional about it, so everything about the physical design of the pool has been informed by psychology considerations. For example, where do we want people to be able to lose themselves in the experience without people leering over them with their cellphones?”

The overall goal, then, is to create a place that has a positive impact on everyone who visits. “Where we’ve got the intervention stuff, the surf therapy, that’s about helping people who are struggling,” he says, “but that’s not enough. That’s where psychology’s focused for the last 100 years, and we’ve made huge progress in that, but we also need to spend some time thinking about how we get people from feeling average to happier, and eventually how we get that whole average up.”

For more on the Lost Shore surf resort, visit www.lostshore.com

Lost Shore: How Scotland's new surf resort was built using health science