Water Doesn’t Need a Plan: Seven Stories from the Edge of a Wave Pool
Last week, we took Gather Round Presents somewhere it’s never been: the edge of a wave pool.
Lovers of the sea, rivers and creativity came from far and wide to pile into The View at Bristol’s inland surf spot, The Wave. Floor-to-ceiling windows. A retractable roof. Surfers carving shapes right behind our speakers as the sun went down. Not a bad backdrop, and the best soundtrack we’ve ever had: waves.
Seven speakers. One evening. Stories told piece by piece, from the heart. Some were funny, some were raw, and one made a room full of people fall a little bit in love with bogs.
This was our most ambitious Gather Round Presents to date, and we all left beaming.
If there was one thread running through the evening, it was this: water doesn’t need a plan. It just needs you to get in.
Follow your blue thread
Rebecca Wetten opened the night by tracing her life through water. Olympic pools as a teenager. The raw, magnificent power of the ocean. Somewhere in between, swimming stopped being joy and became a chore.
Then she found open water, and fell in love with water all over again. That rediscovery has led her to teach others to swim, and to work with The Wave Project, supporting young people’s emotional, mental and physical wellbeing.
From winning medals as an internationally renowned swimmer, Rebecca is now also winning awards for her own start-up Catch Swim. The morning after the event she found out she had won an award in the UK Start-Up Awards! Go Rebecca + team!
Rebecca also touched on her work with Reclaim the Sea. Helping people with refugee and asylum seeking backgrounds gain access, confidence and connection with the ocean.
Everyone has a blue thread: the moments in your life that keep leading back to water. What’s yours?
Get to know your waters
Aggie Nyagari-Salt took us somewhere gentler, in a voice like velvet. Growing up in the warm, familiar waters of her homeland, Kenya, learning to swim in the icy waters of the Atlantic was a shock when she moved to England – but her love of the water made her persevere. Now she finds solace in the River Avon, just down from her home in Conham River Park. But not only solace, inspiration. Aggie directed and produced docu-film, Rave on for the Avon which follows a local community’s fight to save their bathing spot in unique, daring & distinctly Bristolian ways.
In the water, she told us, she feels weightless. Like flying through a cloud. Since finding beauty and inspiration in the river, Aggie is building a community of swimmers, encouraging them to ‘just jump in’ with her. Specifically looking to inspire POC swimmers to join her in reclaiming the river for every-body.
Cold water swimming is a practice. One that Aggie has perfected.
The sea as medicine
As the light faded and the sky behind the surfers got more dramatic by the minute, Ben Powis, CEO of Surfing England, brought us back to earth with some stats surrounding how teenage girls are struggling more than ever with their mental health. A sad reality that left the room in a contemplative state, but Ben and his team have a plan. Through their work with clubs like The Wave Project, who provide surf therapy via a combination of physical activity, connection to nature and trusted adult relationships, young people across the country are rebuilding confidence and resilience through surfing.
With teenage girls particularly prone to dropping out of sport, addressing the lack of female role models in the surfing world is another priority. They have made it their mission to even the playing field and make surfing more accessible to girls at a time when they need it the most. This brought about their new initiative ‘women in coaching’ supporting women from coastal communities across the country to gain their coaching qualifications and run more local surf sessions for girls. They’re tackling teenage sadness with the sea, with social connection and with teamwork.
Keep flowing
Rita Lazaro asked us to leave the ocean for a moment and think about the shower. Yes, the shower. The place where ideas turn up when you’re not looking for them.
She showed us a painting of a boat riding out a storm, a painting that she sold, lost but it kept coming back into her life when times were hard for her. It was something she’d painted a long time ago when she was going through a difficult time in her life.
Ideas and creativity don’t just show up, as Rita highlighted, being in water, or by water is where she feels the most inspired, and ‘in flow’ in every way. Sometimes you have to just get started, don’t make it complicated. She then invited the audience to draw a simple line on a piece of paper which she then curated into a group drawing of a river, with all it’s twists and turns, showcased outside of the event space for everyone to admire as they left.
To finish, she finished with this sentiment: life is like a river. When it meets a rock, it doesn’t stop. It goes around, over or even through, eventually.
Water doesn’t know the route before it starts. Keep going. Keep flowing.
Fall in love with bogs
Hannah Millbank from WWT is a woman on a mission, and her mission is to make you fall in love with bogs.
Wetlands can cool city air by up to five degrees. They clean our water. They make us feel good. They even link us to our past, because so many civilisations grew up around them.
Hannah introduced Bristol Wetland Cities, WWT’s five-year programme, in partnership with Aviva, to help Bristol become the UK’s first accredited Wetland City. The plan is more than 200 projects, from ponds and rain gardens to restored rivers and brooks, reaching over 100,000 people. New floating wetlands went into the Floating Harbour on 8 September to mark the launch. So next time you walk past a marsh, give it a nod.
Bristol’s getting squishy
Tanuki co-founder Ben McCluskey opened in Texas. In 1986. A bit weird? Stick with him.
Back then, years of polite roadside signs hadn’t stopped young men in pickup trucks trashing the state’s highways. So “Don’t Mess with Texas” stopped talking about the environment. It made littering an insult to Texan pride and got Willie Nelson to say so. Litter fell by roughly 70% in four years.
The lesson for blue health: change the words and you change the behaviour. Bin the jargon (biodiversity, sequestration, mitigation) and talk about what people already care about.
That’s the thinking behind Wetland Cities, the campaign Tanuki made with WWT. The launch film barely says “wetland” at all. Instead, Bristol’s getting squishy. It’s a word you can feel underfoot: the boggy corner of the park, the pond that fills after a downpour, the reeds along the harbour. Those squishy places soak up our rain and give wildlife somewhere to live, and the word makes them sound like something to be glad about, not a problem to solve.
The film was shot across the city, from the Floating Harbour to Eastwood Farm. Its cameras point at real people doing real work in their own communities, and Ben’s team talked with every one of them before filming started.
And because pride in your own patch comes naturally, the campaign’s heading into the neighbourhoods next. Look out for posters:
Hartcliffe’s getting squishy. Brislington’s getting squishy. Lockleaze’s getting squishy.
You get the idea.
Blue space for everyone
Nick Hounsfield brought the evening home with something personal. Coming from a family of osteopaths, treating people’s aches and pains, Nick felt that he was always downstream from the problem. After much research and listening to stories from people in his community and beyond, Nick got to work on building The Wave, bringing the power of waves closer to residents of Bristol and neighbouring towns.
Soon, he was the one who found himself in need of some rehabilitation. After suffering a stress-induced stroke, shortly after The Wave opening, Nick found his own rehabilitation in the water. This was a lightbulb moment for Nick, realising a disconnect between people and water. Potential happiness and lack of access. Access to water shouldn’t depend on your wallet, so now, Nick is working with a dedicated team in his latest project, One Blue World, to bring blue spaces to as many communities in Bristol as possible, not just those who can afford a pricey membership to a swimming lake or lido.
Nick, alongside Abby Richardson, has written Do Blue – a deep dive into the power of water and Blue Health. From the flow state of surfing, to the mindfulness of fishing and the exhilaration of cold water immersion, Do Blue reveals a multitude of ways to unlock the power of blue.
So, what now?
Find your blue thread. Get to know your local waters. Say squishy instead of biodiversity. Keep flowing when you hit a rock. And make sure the water you love is open to everyone.
A huge thank you to our sponsors St Eval, Nazcal and Rhythm 108 for the generous goodie bags, and to all the brilliant brands that donated raffle prizes: Dryrobe, Wiper & True, St Eval, Catch Swim, Do Blue and The Wave. And to everyone who came, thank you for making it what it was.
For our 12th edition, we’re revisiting a topic that you all loved last year – Music and Design. We’re bringing this back to Brunswick Square on Thursday 28th January, so keep an eye out for your invite by signing up to our newsletter!
