This 'may' have had something to do with me trying to get rid of some phantom events but that's another story.
All my search results were pointing me at m.google.com/sync however that was a deadend as I have my google accounts set up as google accounts rather than exchange.
This was frustrating me for the last few days until I used a slightly different set of search terms which resulted in https://www.google.com/calendar/iphoneselect !
From here you can bypass the whole exchange thing and directly set the calendars (shared and owned) that will sync to all devices.
Happy day :)
*or any other CALDAV device
*or any other CALDAV device