The dust is beginning to settle on a tumultuous couple of weeks at Bristol’s, The Wave. The wave pool has now re-opened, following a public ‘financial dispute’ that eventually led to the facility being totally shut-down and a lot of confusion as this played out in real-time.
Wavelength reported the news first that something was afoot at The Wave, when the gates were closed, staff locked out of systems, and a string of cryptic, almost frenzied social media posts followed – claiming a cyber attack had happened, administrators called in, new owners and a whole lot of overwhelming information all at once.
Now the Wave has re-opened with new owners and is back to operational order — it’s almost as if all that has been forgotten, but the question remains: what actually happened? And how did it get to this state? (And bonus question: who owns The Wave name now? Is there an imminent rebrand incoming?)
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Well, we’ve spent the past few weeks piecing it all together, having conversations, looking through documents and generally trying to get to grips with what happened here.
Some terminology first, because this is important and it can get a bit complicated. The Wave Group (TWG) Limited, the holding company of The Wave Midco, is the immediate parent of Surf Bristol Limited (SBL), which operated The Wave – when it opened in 2019. Nice and straight forward.
The Wave Group Limited was incorporated in 2018 to act as an investment vehicle for JAR Wave Ltd (JWL), which provided £15 million in loans to fund construction of The Wave. The funds were passed from TWG to SBL via intercompany loans.
JWL was granted a fixed and floating charge debenture (a legal agreement where a lender gains security interest over a borrower’s assets as collateral for a loan) over TWG, while JAR Real Estate Fund PCC Limited (JRE) and JWI were also granted security over SBL’s assets.
Still with us? OK!
Due to a reported construction overspend (though insider sources have since confirmed the project was delivered to budget, and there was no overspend) and COVID-related disruptions, additional funds were borrowed from JRE in 2020. A few years later, London-based private investment firm, Sullivan Street Partners, acquired the majority of the equity in TWG in 2022, facilitating repayment of JRE’s loan. Should be noted that the debt from JWL was into Midco, which in turn owned SBL and Wavescapes.
Who knew such things could lead to a massive amount of bureaucracy. Photo: The Wave.
In April 2023, JWL became subject to a freezing order, and interest payments to JWL were suspended. Although the order was lifted in November 2024 and JWL came under new ownership, TWG did not resume interest payments to JWL (but continued paying JRE). This, understandably, triggered all kinds of tensions.
JWL rejected a proposal from TWG to defer unpaid interest and then sought to bring in BTG Advisory (BTGA) and Begbies Traynor (London) LLP (BT) to consider enforcement options – these are the two administrators.
Negotiations broke down and JWL issued a demand letter on April 9th, 2025 for repayment of all sums owed. With TWG unable to satisfy the demand, JWL appointed administrators on April 22nd 2025. This move was intended to initiate an accelerated mergers and acquisition process to maximise value from TWG’s shareholdings.
Funds belonging to the company and held within a sub-bank account of TWG at the time of administrators’ appointment came in at £179.80. But £76,059.68 was recovered in respect of sums due to TWG by SBL.
Now, after administrators were appointed a sales teaser was sent to a targeted list on May 9th 2025. Interested parties were required to sign NDAs for access to the data room, which was granted on May 16th 2025.
Before that though, on May 15th, the board of Wavescapes Limited (WL, a subsidiary of TWG), which held intellectual properties including branding, web domains and provided software licensing and consultancy to a surf park in Australia, was replaced with JWL representatives as a protective measure to preserve WL’s assets during the sale process.
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Administrators believed the company could not be rescued. There was not enough value in the estate to pay unsecured creditors.
SBL owed TWG aka Midco around £15.1 million, mainly from the original pass-through of JWL’s loans, plus an additional £1.06 million unrelated to JWL lending.
Between May and June, no deal had been found, until, eventually, the business was sold on June 26th and by the 27th, the gates were locked and the site shut down.
By June 30th, Julian Topham was officially announced as the new CEO as part of a financial restructure by a ‘group of investors’. Julian’s company, Sea Level Wave Co LTD, is now in charge of The Wave.
And this is where we are at today.
Founder Nick Hounsfield was on site to release a video from The Wave describing those turbulent few days as ‘a storm’, and he was there to check up on the team.
The day after, The Wave reopened at 6.30am, under that new ownership.
Speaking to Wavelength, former CEO Craig Stoddart, who stepped down in 2022, said about the incident: “It never should have come to this and was totally avoidable. Operations are resuming and the future looks in safe hands.”
Despite all this, there are still some questions that remain:
*Where are Sullivan Street Partners now, who invested £23 million in the business – has this been recouped via the restructuring?
*What happened with the alleged ‘cyber-attack’, and where is the police report up to?
*What will happen with The Wave name? If the rights are not owned by the new company, is a rebrand incoming?
*It seems The Wave in London has now split from its Bristol counter-part, how will this look going forward?
It is unclear yet whether we’ll have answers to this, but Wavelength has contacted Sullivan Street Partners for comment and has requested to talk to various people at The Wave, with no return yet. We’ll keep you posted throughout.
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Related content: Breaking: The Wave Closes | The Wave: Timeline of Events | The Wave Founder Releases Message
