Thanks for the links Fuzz10,
it has helped me dig a bit further. I moved the site from Fasthosts to Heart so have not installed fresh there. The site does work front-end (except home page) so i dont think it is the db config.
I also checked the server logs and found the following error when dev/build is run
PHP Fatal error: Class ' Text' not found in /home/sites/oxtonsportsclub.com/public_html/sapphire/core/Object.php on line 188
I have had a look and the Text Class is present in the models/datatypes folder. Hmmm....