Surfing and the cost of living crisis: feature for Longboarder Magazine

Feature writing for Longboarder Magazine

For my first piece for Longboarder Magazine I interviewed nine surfers in my neck of the woods about the cost of living crisis and how it’s impacting their surfing life. Whoever we are and whatever we’re going through, this tough time will no doubt affect the mental health of so many of us - so I felt it was an important topic to discuss openly. Fortunately the team at Longboarder agreed and commissioned me to write and share the individual stories from my car park chats.

I also got my head into a little research on useful resources like Money Saving Expert and wrote some top tips on how to survive the cost-of-living-crisis storm.

Plus I took all the photos for this feature too (finally putting my degree to use!). So it was a pleasure all round.

You can read the full piece here.

“The cost of living crisis is affecting everything in my life, especially our business. The business is reliant on people coming to Cornwall and learning to surf and I’m worried that people aren’t going to be doing that. We’re in early days too, so we don’t have much money.  

We’re also getting evicted soon, like a lot of people are right? Winter is an expensive time anyway so after wondering what to do for a while, I’ve just decided to leave! I’m going to Lombok. It’s going to be cheaper than living here! But when I come back in April it’s probably going to be the same situation with struggling to find somewhere to live and of course, that’s a worry too.” — Samantha

“A lot of my family and friends can’t afford to live where we were born and grew up in St Merryn, which is difficult. Me and my partner have managed to buy a house but it’s taken us two emotionally-taxing years and we had to save a lot of money. We got gazumped three times and finally we got lucky with an amazing old couple who wanted to sell their house to locals. 

I find it really sad that whole communities are getting lost and generations of families are being forced to move inland. There’s nothing wrong with being inland in Cornwall but being by the sea is a big part of our heritage. We’re coastal dwellers and I just think that it’s a crying shame that young generations of people that want to live and work here are being pushed out. 

I think an important thing to change this would be for second home owners to pay council tax. I think it’s ridiculous that they don’t have to. And we need more affordable housing, without ridiculous waiting lists for the help-to-buy scheme.

The cost of living crisis means it’s going to be tough to get through this winter too. I’m fortunate to have been able to go to uni and that’s got me into a job where I earn ok money, but we’re still living pay cheque to pay cheque.” — Molly