Crest Experiences

Who owns Crest Experiences?

Crest Experiences is currently owned by Souter Investments through Souter Investments (Balance Sheet) (2008 vintage), since 2022.

Hand-verified · updated 2026-07-16

About Crest Experiences

Crest Experiences is a United Kingdom active-leisure developer and operator specialising in inland surf attractions, designing, building and running artificial surf lakes together with their surrounding food, beverage and wellbeing offerings. Its founding asset was The Wave near Bristol, which opened in October 2019 as one of the first inland surf destinations in the Northern Hemisphere built on Wavegarden Cove technology, generating waves for surfers of all abilities across a purpose-built lagoon set in green parkland. The company positions itself as a surf-park specialist with a pipeline of larger sites, most prominently Surf London, a roughly 100-acre development at Lee Valley Regional Park estimated at about GBP 60 million that secured a planning committee approval in September 2025. Its stated commercial model pairs surfing capacity with ancillary spend on food, beverage and events to lift per-site profitability.

Ownership journey

The underlying business grew out of The Wave, conceived by founder Nick Hounsfield from around 2010 and opened in Bristol in 2019 after nearly a decade of development. In 2022 the surf operator was acquired into the Crest Experiences platform, backed by Souter Investments, the Edinburgh family office of Stagecoach founder Brian Souter, as part of an investment of about GBP 27 million intended to fund a national rollout of new sites. The plan set out at the time envisaged up to five further surf parks across the UK and Ireland over five to seven years, each spanning roughly 70 to 100 acres. Souter Investments continues to list Crest Experiences as a current portfolio holding, described as a leading surf-park developer and operator, and no exit or secondary transaction has been recorded for its stake.

Under PE ownership

Under the 2022 investment the business set out to shift from a single Bristol site toward a multi-site development platform, signing an agreement with wave-technology provider Endless Surf in February 2025 and advancing the Surf London scheme, which won a planning committee approval in September 2025 with construction targeted from 2026. The rollout has not been smooth: the Bristol surf lake was placed into a technical insolvency and financial restructuring in mid-2025, with its operating assets passing to a separate new owner, while Crest Experiences continued to push its London pipeline. As of 2026 the company's strategy centres on the larger London development and further UK sites rather than the original Bristol venue. Progress on that development pipeline, rather than any realised financial return, is the clearest marker of the period since the investment.