Carve
Carve is a British surfing magazine published from Newquay in Cornwall by Orca Publications. Founded with its first issue in spring 1994, Carve was created to represent British and Irish surfing in the way that American and Australian magazines represented their own scenes: documenting travel, giving home surfers the coverage that could help them win sponsorship, telling the stories of local surfers doing remarkable things, and campaigning against the dumping of sewage in the sea. Thirty years later, in 2024, the magazine celebrated its thirtieth anniversary, by which time it had published 224 editions as well as a number of books. Edited for most of its life by Steve England, who joined on its fourth issue and remained its editor three decades on, Carve covers surfing in Britain and Ireland alongside international travel and competition, supported by an extensive website carrying news, guides and films. It is published alongside its sister magazine SurfGirl from Berry Road Studios in Newquay, in the town that has been the centre of British surfing since the 1960s.
Origins in 1994
Issue one of Carve was published in spring 1994 by Chris Power. Its founding aim, as recalled by the magazine on its thirtieth anniversary, was to get people enthused about surfing and to represent British and Irish surfing as overseas magazines represented their own countries. Steve England, who became the magazine's long-serving editor, wrote about a trip to Portugal for the first issue and joined the staff full-time on issue four, as assistant editor and advertising manager, remaining with the title ever since. England has described how the idea of working for a surfing magazine arose when he was asked about his dream job while studying at Plymouth, at a time when Britain effectively had no surf magazine to work for. His ambitions for the title were to inspire surfers to travel the world, to give British and Irish surfers the coverage that would help them gain sponsors and live their dreams as overseas professionals did, to tell home stories about local surfers, and to fight the water companies over sewage in the sea. Those aims, he wrote in 2024, were ones the magazine had sought to stand by for thirty years.
British and Irish Surfing as a Subject
Carve's founding insight was that British and Irish surfing deserved to be taken seriously on its own terms. In 1994, the magazine recalls, surfers from these islands were still treated as anomalies abroad, asked whether they drank tea and surfed in rivers, and few outsiders understood why anyone loved surfing in such conditions: waiting for breaks in weather systems, on raw and brutal coastlines with dark water, endless storms, huge tides and no palm trees. Three decades on, cold-water surfing has become recognised internationally, and cold-water swimming is celebrated for its health benefits, a shift the magazine has both documented and helped to bring about. Carve's coverage treats the Atlantic coasts of Cornwall, Devon, Wales, Scotland and Ireland, and the North Sea coasts of England and Scotland, as serious surfing territory, with their own breaks, seasons, characters and history. Local surfers doing remarkable things, in the magazine's founding phrase, remain its staple: home competitors, big-wave riders, travellers and shapers whose stories rarely appeared in overseas titles.
Travel, Competition and Photography
Travel is the second pillar of Carve. Its features and guides encourage readers to seek waves worldwide, and its website organises this material into extensive travel and guide sections, covering destinations from Morocco and Portugal to long-haul trips, airline surfboard baggage rules, solo travel and luxury surf travel. The magazine's photography-led presentation of foreign breaks contrasts with, and complements, its home coverage: readers are shown both what is possible in tropical water and what can be scored at home between storms. Competition coverage follows British and Irish surfers at home and internationally, including the professional circuit in Cornwall, where the Boardmasters festival at Fistral Beach in Newquay hosts World Surf League qualifying and longboard events. Carve reports results, interviews competitors and follows the careers of home professionals and emerging juniors, with the explicit purpose, present since 1994, of helping British and Irish surfers build the profiles on which sponsorship and professional careers depend.
Guides, Gear and Practical Content
Carve supports its features with practical guidance tailored to cold-water surfing. Its guides include summer and winter wetsuit guides, winter wetsuit accessory guides and winter survival advice, recognising that in British and Irish waters the right neoprene is the difference between surfing all year and not surfing at all. Travel guidance covers planning, baggage and destinations, while gift guides, local guides such as its guide to Newquay, and features on surf culture broaden the mix. This practical strand runs on the magazine's website between issues, where news is published continuously. The result is a title that functions both as a celebration of surfing and as a handbook for doing it from these islands, answering the questions its readers actually face: how thick a wetsuit for January, how to fly with boards, where to travel for winter sun, and how to survive the cold months while staying in the water.
Campaigning: Sewage and the Sea
From its first issues, Carve combined celebration with campaigning. Fighting the water companies dumping sewage in the sea was among the founding editor's stated purposes for the magazine, long before sewage discharges became a leading national environmental story in Britain. The concern is intrinsic to surfing in Britain and Ireland, where many breaks lie near towns and river mouths and surfers are among the first to experience polluted water. Carve's journalism has kept the condition of the sea in front of its readers as part of ordinary surf reporting, linking water quality to the community's ability to enjoy its own coast. The magazine has also celebrated community action of other kinds, such as the Board Drive, in which a single surfboard donated from a shed in Newquay grew, through social media, a Cornish surf shop and charities including Surfers Not Street Children, into a national campaign sending boards to children in South Africa and Mozambique. Such stories reflect Carve's self-image as a voice of a connected and grounded surf community.
Orca Publications and SurfGirl
Carve is published by Orca Publications from Berry Road Studios, Berry Road, Newquay, Cornwall, which is also the home of its sister magazine SurfGirl, the magazine for women surfers founded in 2002. The two titles share a publisher, a town and a community, and they appear together in the life of Cornish surfing: when a joint celebration was held at Lusty Glaze Beach in Newquay in 2024, marking 140 years of combined milestones, Carve's thirtieth birthday was celebrated alongside the twenty-fifth anniversary of Lusty Glaze, thirty years of Sharp's Brewery and fifty-five years of Newquay Boardriders, with Carve's editor Steve England reflecting on three decades of producing and printing the magazine, its 224 editions and its books. Orca's model is that of an independent specialist publisher rooted in its scene: Carve and SurfGirl are made by surfers in Britain's surf capital, a few streets from Fistral Beach, and their credibility with readers rests on that immersion. The magazine's contact base at Berry Road has remained a fixed point through three decades of publishing change.
Thirty Years and 224 Editions
Carve's thirtieth anniversary in 2024 was marked in print and in person. In the magazine, Steve England looked back on the grant-funded student conversation that first named a surf magazine as a dream job, on writing for issue one in spring 1994 and on joining full-time with issue four, concluding that the magazine's editors, storytellers and photographers had stood by its original aims across thirty years. The numbers tell the story of consistency in a difficult market: 224 editions over three decades, plus books, at a time when many print magazines have closed or gone digital-only. The anniversary celebrations in Newquay, held with partners from across Cornish surf culture and attended by the community the magazine serves, underlined Carve's position not simply as a periodical but as an institution of British surfing, one of the few media organisations to have documented the scene continuously from the 1990s to the present.
Digital Presence
Alongside print, Carve maintains an extensive website publishing news, features, guides and films, including video reports and surf clips from Britain, Ireland and worldwide. The site organises years of material into browsable sections, from news archives running to hundreds of pages to specialist guides, and it allows the magazine to respond to swells, results and stories as they happen rather than at print deadlines. Major news, such as the World Surf League's return to Boardmasters, appears online first, while the print magazine provides the considered features, photography and travel writing for which it is known. Social channels extend that conversation. This hybrid model is now standard for specialist magazines, but Carve's version is notable for the depth of its archive: three decades of British and Irish surfing are searchable in one place, giving the title a reference value for surfers researching breaks, boards, people and the history of their own sport.
Carve Today
Today Carve continues to publish from Newquay as Britain and Ireland's surfing magazine of record, edited by Steve England and produced by Orca Publications alongside SurfGirl. Its mission remains the one set out in 1994: to enthuse people about surfing, to represent British and Irish surfers who were once dismissed as anomalies, to inspire travel, to support home professionals and storytellers, and to defend the cleanliness of the sea its readers surf in. The growth of cold-water surfing into an internationally recognised culture has vindicated the magazine's founding argument, and Carve's files document how that change happened. For surfers in Britain and Ireland, it remains both a mirror and a motor: reflecting their coasts, storms and communities back to them in print, and pushing new generations to travel, compete and care for the water.
