Inside Lost Shore: Andy Hadden's Vision for Surfing in Scotland

We recently took a meander out to Lost Shore Surf Resort, just 25 minutes from the city center in Ratho, Lost Shore is a year round surfing haven and community hub. The lagoon is beautifully framed by gorse-covered cliffs, and with the wave garden constantly splashing in the background, there's a buzz of excited energy that fills the place. We were very excited to be chatting with Andy Hadden, the founder of this unique and pioneering resort. Up until its opening last year, there was a huge anticipation surrounding Lost Shore as it would be the first of its kind to land here in Scotland. It's the country's first inland surf destination and is home to Europe's largest wave pool, as well as being one of the most advanced in the world. A huge step in Scottish tourism, Lost Shore is more than a surf spot, with a selection of chic, on-site accommodations, a cafe/ restaurant, spa, and shop that make this an attraction for everyone, not just surfers. Starting the afternoon with a tour around the incredible facilities with Andy himself, we sat down for a cuppa and a chat about what it takes to get a project like this off the ground. Dive in to find out more about how the seed for this idea came about, how Andy turned it into reality, and how Lost Shore plays a role in a larger vision for surfing in Scotland.

Funnily enough, what started my interest was my father being a school teacher. He did an exchange program to Australia, a place called Surfers Paradise, when I was seven years old. So I went over there for a year, and apparently all I used to bang on about was how big the waves were and everything else like that. And then when I came back to Scotland, it must have lived with me because when I went back after school to work over there, I kind of took it up a little bit. But even then, coming back to Scotland (this is going back more than 20 years), I didn't know there was a surfing scene here. It was only when I figured out there was a bit of a scene forming, I bought my own board, and yeah, it's just kind of always been my second passion since then. None of my friends really did it or anything. But, you know, I'm glad that I picked it up now.

In my particular case, I grew up where my father was also a school teacher in a public school, an all-boys school, where they had endless facilities. So my experience growing up in Scotland in the school grounds was that I could access a host of sports, and I did that sort of naively, not thinking too philosophically about it. But what I noticed is that I used the outdoors from a very young age in sport and activity as something I enjoyed. And when I left school and came into business, I realised all my social networks were around people that I was meeting. It was good for me physically. I suppose looking back is good for me mentally. You know, you're not thinking about that type of stuff back then. I think my experience of growing up in Scotland was suddenly defined when I realised that other kids and other people in Scotland hadn't had that, and other kids in other countries with better facilities, better weather, were getting access to all those things. So for me, it was an inspiring thing for me to realise- if I could translate a little bit of that facility and that access to activity for other people, that's what drove me to do it here in Scotland.

I think if you ask most surfers, they'll be able to tell you exactly where they caught their first green wave. Not just standing up on the whiteboard, which is super fun, but that first moment when you get up on a wave, and you go left or right, and you realise you're kind of in a dance with Mother Nature. And it's this very smooth feeling, and it's not like you're not just getting turbulence thrown through you. I can remember that extremely vividly. That was in Coldingham Bay, a major place in Scotland, with tiny, little high waves. And once I did that once, I was like, ‘this sport is gonna live with me now in my brain forever, and I can't do anything about it’.

Yeah, I think you put it quite well there. I sat on the board of the Scottish Surfing Federation for years and years, and we had to have a non-Lost Shore plan and a Lost Shore plan, and they were incredibly different things. The Scottish surf culture is, as you can imagine, with every kind of hardcore peripheral sport, actually started in the 70s. It ran right the waythrough the surf community in various parts of Scotland, especially in the Highlands and islands, and to an extent here in the South East and in the Northeast Scotland as well. It’s extremely close-knit, everyone knows everyone, and it’s a brilliant community to be involved in. But then there’s this inflection point, in not just Scottish surfing but surfing in general, where wetsuits are getting better, the wave becomes an Olympic sport, and then the concept of wave pools is like heaven for surfers. It's definitely going through this big transitional period. And what we're seeing now, which is the most phenomenal thing with the wave pool, is that it's not only helping grow the Scottish Surfing community, it's also bringing us closer, and it's doing it in a way that is culturally pleasant.

Because a lot of the countries where surfing is established in the world, you know, you think of Australia, Hawaii, and America, there's a scarcity of waves there. There is inevitably going to be a machismo culture that comes out of that, because it's a bit of ‘survival of the fittest’. Whereas in Scotland, we never reached that point in the ocean, and so the surf community is still warm with each other. So we're very committed as a surf community as a whole to make sure that, yes, while we've got our top-level waves and everything else like that, we want to just bring everyone into the Stoke in a manageable way. The wave pool is a great asset for that, where you're not just throwing people into the ocean in very dangerous environments. You're not creating that machismo culture. So yeah, we see a real opportunity here to work with the existing surf community to just make Scotland the best Surf culture in the years to come.

Well, I always say I was toiling away down in Birmingham as a charter surveyor. I had actually been made redundant twice, and I was always driving down to New Key and Wales, surfing, staying in my car, and all the rest of it. So then, when I got an email from a guy whowas far more credible than I within the company, and said ‘I've got links into a company in Spain who are developing like endless waves,’ I picked up the phone to him as a seniorsurveyor, and just said, ‘this doesn't sound true’. I surf, and there's no way that this is going to be anything like surfing. And I'm really fortunate that he got me into that test facility. I flew out to the Basque Country in 2012 and into the mountains there, and saw these engineers and surfers working on this revolutionary piece of tech. Ever since that day, I was kind of like, ‘well, if this is ever going to happen, I would love to do it in Scotland and try and bring all the health and physical benefits and economic benefits to a place where I know’.

Yeah. I mean, looking back now, I was quite naive. I could see this very clearly for 10 years, and then I couldn't get why no one else could see it. And then we had a lot of good early-stage funders that were patient, wanting this for the right reasons, in my opinion- financial return, but also doing something good. I couldn't believe when you got into the more sophisticated, larger funders and just how their return proposal seemed financially greedy, and frankly, it's not even their fault as individuals, as everybody is working off mandates. So with those two things in mind, and then understanding just how commercially on point this place was going to have to be to ever exist, I just resorted to working with people. I realised that if I could just work with little pods of people that I knew, we could overcome, in piecemeal, all of these various challenges. That's been a real pleasure for me over the 10 years, getting these little wins behind the scenes with people that you know and trust, and can be like, ‘Ah, I can't believe we've done it.’ And yeah, that's what's kind of kept me going. Then there's also not often been a workplace and, like, I don't think my wife has been very happy with this over the years, because it's not a steady state of emotion. You're high-fiving and hugging in the office, or your head in your hands, like ‘it's all over, what do we do?’ It was just like that for years and years, but now I’m kind of done with that, and it’s a little bit more of a peaceful existence.

Well, there'd be an analogy with, say, a snow dome compared to skiing or something like that, where, if you might go and use that snow dome, but secretly you wish you were up in Glenshee, or you know, skiing in the Cairngorms, or in the Alps. So in skiing parlance, this is a whole ski resort in one body of water, which goes from very much your beginner, gentle green runs, right the way through to the black runs. You've seen it today with professional surfers in here. And what the actual technology is, it's a body of water that's about three times the size of Murray field rugby pitch, and it can run up to 1000 waves an hour. At the back, you get the better surfers in what's called the reef, and the waves just keep going and going. Naturally, that water created by those waves creates whitewater. So at the front, at the same time, you have beginners. It means we can get up to 80 people in the lagoon at any one time, and that technology is made by paddles pushing water out against a retaining wall, and then we grate the bottom of the lagoon (what we call it bathymetry). It’s those three components that create the waves that you see.

Lost Shore is a brilliant place to start. You can start your surfing journey anywhere, anywhere. There are some fantastic surf schools and clubs around Scotland that will deliver lessons out there in the ocean. What we're bringing is that consistency, whilst we're working closely with them. I suppose you can set your watch by it, and you can come in here repeatedly in a very safe environment. As I was telling you earlier, it took me three years to learn how to stand up and go along a wave, yet it took my eight-year-old daughter four sessions. And once you get that, once you're hooked, then you're a surfer for life in your head, and you're going to find a way back to it.

I mean, surf skating is probably the only magic ingredient for on-land Surf Training. Because of the way that they've designed the trucks on the front of these surfboards, it means you have to move that board in a similar way, if you're taught well, to how you would surf. But surfskate has been around for a while. In fact, the onset of skateboarding and bulls and everything was generally a surfing movement. And so when they created their first longboards way back in California, a lot of it actually is more akin to the smooth surfskate riding. And in the past 10 years, it's become more of a global phenomenon, because of the surfing movement, seeing that there are benefits to going back to this way of doing it. So when we came across Sebastian, who was for me, as good at training dynamics between surf skating and surfing as anyone that I've come across, it was a no-brainer to back him and integrate his Surf Skate Academy into our resort. And what we're seeing now is kids and adults alike having sessions with him, and coming and buying surfskates, which adds to the vibe of the resort completely. We're delighted.

I think that's sort of the commercial part of the facility. Is that whilst even in hindsight, we could have just opened the surf lagoon and in my opinion, had a very strong business case. In Scotland, there's an undersaturation of accommodation at scale, especially for staycationers and the likes. It's actually very hard to set these up, because you need land (you know, think of your Center Parcs and Crieff Hydro that do well). At these places, there are spots you can go where everyone's happy. The kids are happy, the parents are happy, and the grandparents are happy. If we could tap into that market, we need some accommodation at scale, then it de-risks the whole proposition and makes it more of a resort. That's why I did that. 

Well, I think one of the reasons we managed to get funded by pension funds and national banks was that, as much as we like to think, we had the most financially lucrative-looking proposition. The reality is that yes, they could see that we were doing ESG (not even knowing what ESG meant 10 years ago), more authentically than a lot of others were doing it. Especially at this scale of property development. And so we have a quarterly reporting process that keeps us on this, but from a high level, it's more like we're surfers, and we want the biodiversity to be good here. We want it to be environmentally friendly, and as an illustration of that, you know our CEO, Joe Franco, was the founder of Vegware, which was leading the global movement in recycling food packaging. He's now the CEO here. So rest assured that we are really all over sustainability, we're not going to stop till we're really at the forefront of our sustainable credentials. It's amazing.

Well, again, on paper, when you're building a surf Park in Scotland, people are going to think you're completely daft from the outset, right? And I understand that. One thing I think in Scotland that we've always succeeded in is that we work better together, we become greater than the sum of our parts, and that's generally due to relationships. I was a volunteer myself at the Wave Project 10 years ago, and when I was down there, even though I'd been surfing for 10 years already, it opened my eyes to the type of effect this could have for everyone. You know, you could see the kids just going in, and it was like it was transforming their lives, and you've seen a bit of that today.

So the guy who was running those sessions at the time, Jamie Marshall, then wanted to study the science behind this. He's now the world's first doctor in surf therapy. We helped him through the Napier University and through that. We all said, well, if we can integrate this into our facility authentically, it's going to give the most benefits to these individuals. That’s the most important thing, but also what it's going to do is cement our authentic reputation within the community. And we believe that people now, when they're spending discretionary money to go somewhere, they want to come to a place where they feel like it's materially helping the communities around them. And so there are a lot of reasons for us to back that, and that's the story of how the Wave Project became integrated into our resort.

I would like to see us at the top level. I want to see our kids be some of the best in the world. I mean, how mad is that if Scottish kids growing up in the central belt are able to take on Hawaiians? I mean, there's no reason why it can't be, so from a high level, I want to see that. Probably what's even more inspiring to me is the way I've seen it affect people's lives. Surfing is an adrenaline sport for some, but it's an escape for others. It's a place to socialise, it's a place to be on your own. You're getting all that cold water immersion, you're getting that benefit from the outdoors. And so I think if we can show the people of Scotland who come here that surfing is a good pastime to have, then what we're going to find is that we're going to transform a lot of people's lives, even if not in an explicit way.

And if the surf community can run at the same pace as the demand runs at, we're going to create our own surf economy, like Glentress has done for mountain biking. And we're going to have more people working in the industry, more people enjoying it. It's going to be good for the country's economy. It's going to be good for the NHS long-term. And I don't see that as a zero-sum game, so in 10 years, I just hope that surfing is thriving. I hope that Scotland is the brain of surfing globally, because nothing is stopping us from being that. I also hope the level of our kids, considering we've already got some of the best waves in the world, is right up there at the top of the sport.

I mean, looking back, the reason I was probably so keen on driving to New Key and Rest Bay from Birmingham, staying in my car and stuff, was probably because I'd been made redundant twice. And without that, I just wanted to do something else. But actually, more so than my individual scenario, I've got more than a dozen people I've spoken to who would say surfing has saved their lives. And they’re saying that in quite a serious way. So you're like, if it's having that type of effect for people that are that troubled with their mental health, then what a great intervention is for the rest of us that haven't reached that stage. You can integrate that into your life. I just think you're just going to have less of those problems going forward, if you can always just know that if you dip into water and dip into a community that is surrounding you, you're gonna be happier.

If I'm looking around the world, I'd say there's probably a break in northern Spain called Mundaka. And I love Northern Spain, the Basque Country has a big affiliation with this project. It's a world-class left, and I'm a goofy footer, so that'd be perfect. There's no way I'd get on there for the whole day because the locals wouldn't let me, but I would surf Mundaka all day by myself in Spain.

Things on the short-term horizon are just letting people know about us. You saw it yourself when you came down here. It doesn't matter how much I explain this, even to your readers or viewers, they will get shocked when they come down here. And so, if we are to fulfill all of our goals, which are lofty, we want to be the best adventure sports destination in the world. I don't see why we can't aim for that. We want to do that, but people need to come. So short term, I just want to get the word out there and get people down here. They don't have to surf, just come for coffee, for the vibe, come and shop, and have some treatments or whatever it is you fancy.

We hope we've given you a glimpse into one of Edinburgh's most exciting new must-see spots. If you want to find out more about Lost Shore, how to book a lesson, visit the site, or stay at a pod, you can check out their website here: lostshore.com. Don't forget to tag us in your adventures so we can see what you're getting up to. Use @meanderapparel or #everydayadventures for the chance to be featured on our page.