Do Blue by Nick Hounsfield & Abby Richardson review: 'an easy-to-digest primer on blue health'
Sceptical about ‘blue health’? A new book suggests it may be time to dive in, writes Roger Cox
Nick Hounsfield is to the south-west of England what Andy Hadden is to the south-east of Scotland: the wavemaker; the man who brought surfing to the landlocked masses. In November 2019, Hounsfield opened the UK’s first inland surfing lake, The Wave, at Easter Compton just outside Bristol; then, almost exactly five years later, Hadden opened the Lost Shore surf park at Ratho near Edinburgh – a larger facility, but based on the same groundbreaking Wavegarden Cove technology.
The similarities between the two men don’t end there. For one thing, both cite their relationships with their fathers as foundational in the development of their wave pool projects. In a 2024 interview with The Scotsman, Hadden spoke about how sports-related dinner table conversations with his father Frank (who coached the Scotland rugby team from 2005-2009) got him thinking about the “10,000 hours” supposedly needed to train elite athletes, and how a wave pool might give Scotland’s next generation of surfers the chance to build up valuable water time traditionally denied them by our notoriously fickle surf conditions.
In Hounsfield’s case, it was the unexpected death of his father that spurred him on to create The Wave. In the introduction to his new book Do Blue, co-authored with wild swimmer and communications consultant Abby Richardson, he writes “It was back in 2010 that I was called into hospital to say goodbye to my dad for the last time. He’d had a cancer operation that was meant to extend his life, but it went tragically wrong. Standing by his bedside, as his last breaths were taken, I made a promise: to be a good person, a great dad and do something to make him proud – leave a legacy that is a testament to the care, laughter and smiles he had brought into the world. That was the start of The Wave.”
Both men also put health at the centre of their wave pool projects. For Hadden, this was largely done via a tie-in with The Wave Project, a charity that aims to improve the mental health of young people through surf therapy. In fact, “tie-in” doesn’t really do justice to the extent of the collaboration – Jamie Marshall, formerly Scottish coordinator for the Wave Project and the first person in the world to gain a PhD in Surf Therapy – was hired as Lost Shore’s social and health innovation lead and was even involved in the design of the wave park, making sure, among other things, that surfers out in the water don’t fall prey to the so-called “goldfish bowl effect” caused by being too closely overlooked by spectators, allowing for a more immersive experience.
Similarly, Hounsfield set out to make The Wave a place where people could benefit from “blue health” – the idea that being in and around water can improve both physical and mental wellbeing. Working as an osteopath in the years before he became a wave pool entrepreneur, Hounsfield recalls, “I began to see a pattern in the patients I was treating. They weren’t spending time outdoors in nature, they were increasingly inactive, and were becoming lonely and isolated in their communities... I wanted to change that... I started to imagine a space that could bring people together, connecting them to nature, themselves and each other, and helping them to become more active.”
In Do Blue, Hounsfield and Richardson use the creation of The Wave (Richardson worked on PR for the project) as a jumping-off point for an easy-to-digest primer for anyone interested in finding out more about blue health. It’s still a relatively new area of study, and one that is bound to attract a fair amount of scepticism, given that so many of the people championing it are surfers, wild swimmers and others who might be perceived to be pursuing alternative lifestyles, so some careful scientific underpinning is required. Equally, though, as the authors point out, “we’re pretty sure you’re not here for a thesis on the subject.” Their approach, then, is “a spoonful of science, simplified” and largely this works well.
There’s enough, for example, on Stephen and Rachel Kaplan’s Attention Restoration Theory and their 1980s research into the recovery-promoting “soft fascination” watery environments can evoke to convince you that there’s probably something in it, without getting bogged down in technicalities. Similarly, there’s enough on surfing and the benefits of entering what psychologist Mihály Csíkszentmihályi calls the “flow state”, or on Professor Mike Tipton’s research into the positive effects of cold water immersion, to make you want to find out more, but not so much detail that you want to skip to the next page.
In the end, though, it’s the anecdotes and first-person stories, rather than citations of scientific papers, that convince: the emergency services personnel benefitting from surf therapy via the Surfwell charity; the cancer patients using cold water immersion via another charity, Into the Blue; and Hounsfield’s own water-based recovery from a stroke in 2020. If blue health treatments very obviously seem to be working, do we need to know exactly why before taking the plunge?
Do Blue: Water, waves and wellbeing, by Nick Hounsfield & Abby Richardson, Do Book Co, £11.99
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