About the data
Where the spots come from, and how far to trust them.
This is a first pass at a UK spot database, drafted from public sources and not yet verified by people who ride these beaches. Treat it as a well-researched starting point rather than a reference.
How it is structured
Three tiers, deliberately not flattened. A region is a navigation grouping. A location is a stretch of coast or estuary sharing one wind-and-tide character. A spot is a specific launch point — and one location often holds two or three spots with materially different conditions. Hayling Island alone has a free public beach, a paid club beach and an offshore sandbar that only exists at low water.
What is in it
- Regions
- 26across the four nations
- Locations
- 87stretches of coast and estuary
- Spots
- 110of which 25 are marked published
- Organisations
- 28schools, shops, clubs and associations
How confident to be
Every spot carries a confidence rating and a list of the sources each claim came from.
| Rating | What it means | Spots |
|---|---|---|
| High | The operational detail — tide rules, zones, permits, hazards — came from the beach’s own operator, its club or the landowner. | 25 |
| Medium | Two or more independent guides agree. | 34 |
| Low | A single source, usually just enough to confirm the spot exists and roughly which winds work. | 51 |
What it deliberately captures
The fields that forecast apps do not carry:
- Tide rules and cut-off risk
- Permit and insurance requirements
- Named hazards, with severity
- Formal zones and seasonal restrictions
- Parking and facilities
- Nearest A&E and RNLI station
- Water quality designation
- Webcams
- Local clubs and Facebook groups
- A sea-breeze profile, with its local mechanism
The sea-breeze model is the one worth explaining. The rule is universal — a big enough land-sea temperature difference, clear skies and a light gradient wind — but the coefficients are local. Camber has twelve miles of flat marsh behind it and an old cliff line further inland, and riders there routinely see a third more wind than the forecast on a sunny spring day. That effect dies off from mid-September once the sea warms up. A generic formula would miss both halves of that.
Caveats
Beach access arrangements, permit prices and club rules change without notice. Coordinates are indicative launch points, not survey grade. Nothing here replaces checking the tide, watching the beach and asking a local.