Brothers who grew up in central London, our Irish grandmother, Beatrice Blackstock, lived with us for the first twenty years of life. She gifted us with a strong sense of kindness and free-spirited adventure having spent the younger years of her life helping the Toba Amerindians in South America in the 1940s. Building on that, our father Mike, a master shipwright from Dorset, showed us there was nothing that you couldn’t achieve with your own two hands. As the competition judge for the British Surf Team through the 1970s, he also used to throw us into the winter seas as kids with various boards and old diving wetsuits to try our hands at surfing. Needless to say, we’ve been in love with surfing ever since.

Tim

Tim has pursued a career in design and manufacture. His work has included theatre set building, furniture, architectural glass, sunglasses, high-end bespoke chandeliers, music festival installations and staffing a leading ‘closed loop’ consultancy. He also runs his own design and construction business, attempting to personally and positively impact the largest polluting industry in the world. He organises community football, runs ‘Dadventure’ to help fathers connect with their kids through nature, and lives in Brighton with his wife Carrie, three tearaway kids and two beloved mutts.

Ben

Ben has been in teaching or conservation for most of his adult life. From working in sustainable agriculture in Uganda, to teaching biology in English secondary schools, to facilitating community rainforest conservation in the Amazon, he has maintained his love of nature alongside developing a rigorous approach to tackling complex environmental problems. He was living in the mountains of Asturias, Northern Spain, before the pandemic brought him back to the UK. He loves rugby, singing, and lives on Albatros, his sailing boat, with Otto (his scruffy dog).

Our Story

The idea

The two of us have been brainstorming different sustainable enterprise ideas for two decades, from electric outboard motors to recycling plastic, never quite finding something that was workable both as a business and as a genuine contribution to environmental betterment. In 2019 Ben did a ‘build-your-own’ wooden board making course with James Otter in Porthtowan, Cornwall. After a few amazing weeks in the carpentry workshop, learning the ways of wooden shaping from a master craftsman, we took the wooden boards to be ‘finished’. This involved travelling to a traditional board shaping company where they covered the already strong wooden constructions with layers of epoxy resin and fibreglass matt, to waterproof and further strengthen them.

The chemical filled work spaces and staff wearing protective suits and masks was horrible; an indicator of the hazardous nature of the materials and manufacturing process. It was so incongruous and seemingly unnecessary, substantially taking away from the environmental credentials of the board. Making wooden boards is one step in the right direction but there must be another, kinder, natural way to finish the boards too.

The beginning

We rented a garage off a friend in Brighton, used scrap wood from Tim’s construction projects to build benches and shelving, accumulated some old tools and spent the entirety of the coronavirus lockdowns developing board shapes, build methods and critically, a natural oil finish that both waterproofs and toughens the lightweight wooden boards we make. Tim also started hand-making old school skateboard decks, following another passion of ours.

Our workshop at ‘The Patch’

After 18 months the garage became too small for two people and our various resources so we sought to upsize. We found a small rough patch of ground down the back of a cobbled mews on the Brighton-Hove border and sourced a second-hand timber cabin to build on it. With some dry stone walls as foundations and foraged cork panels as insulation, we’ve made ourselves a fully repurposed workspace and have started growing vegetables and a wildflower meadow at ‘The Patch’. It’s a calm space, 100 yards from the sea where we slowly hand make beautiful surfboards, skateboards, fins and bodysurfing handplanes.

The Blackstock Vision

At the moment we are making performance surf craft and skateboards in the most sustainable way we can. That was one of our original goals. But there are more.

Firstly, we want to see disadvantaged people benefit from the process of making boards with us: feel the committed rhythm of the workshop; benefit from skills training; build their confidence; and even attain a job reference. The homeless community, refugees and at-risk young adults are three particular cohorts we’re moved to help, are identifiable in our local area, as well us both having experience working with them.

Secondly, we don’t want to simply create luxury items that only more well-off people can afford.  Having an environmental conscience shouldn’t be dependent on having a fat wallet. As such we’re exploring ways of bringing the price of our surfboards down from in the thousands, to into the hundreds.

These two visions may well feed into each other in the future through a hybrid social enterprise model. Watch this space.