The Serre–Green–Naghdi (SGN) equations, also known as the fully-nonlinear Boussinesq wave equations, accurately describe the behaviour of dispersive shoaling water waves. This article presents and validates a novel combination of methods for the numerical approximation of solutions to the SGN equations. The approach preserves the robustness of the original finite-volume Saint-Venant solver, in particular for the treatment of wetting/drying and equilibrium states. The linear system of coupled vector equations governing the dispersive SGN momentum sources is solved simply and efficiently using a generic multigrid solver. This approach generalises automatically to adaptive quadtree meshes. Adaptive mesh refinement is shown to provide orders-of-magnitude gains in speed and memory when applied to the dispersive propagation of waves during the Tohoku tsunami. The source code, test cases and examples are freely available.