According to RP1 over on Warships1,
Wrap around boosters were used on Sea Slug to “pull” it due to fears that the more conventional booster arrangement would make the missile unstable in the early stages of flight.
As an aside, one of the early Soviet naval SAM projects was to use 4 wrap around boosters at the nose, but this was probably to reduce overall length – that weapon would have been about 15m long!
http://p216.ezboard.com/fwarships1discussionboardsfrm3.showMessage?topicID=5365.topic&index=30
More likely was wrap around boosts came about due to the low power of the British solid rocket motors at the time. Sea Slug used the pull system as it allowed the booster design to dispense with boost fins like those that were fitted to the Bloodhound and Thunderbird, thus making the weapon a lot smaller in all three dimensions. Bloodhound was originally going to be fitted with a Tandem booster based on one of Talos, however it was found that the much smaller tail diameter of the British missile made the chances of design working small, after a lot of XTV 1 and 2 small scale test vehicles jack knifed. After that a design called the overlap was used on later XTV 2,3 and 5s which had a pair of Mayfly boosts mounted each side of the missile in line with the wings (Bloodhound having an X tail configuration at the time). However it was found on the first XTV 4s that reached Mach 2 that the X-tail interacted with the ramjet exhaust and made the round unstable. This was cured with the design that later when into service with allowed the X configuration wrap around boost configuration. Forward mounted boosts were tried on the first Bristol JTV ramjet test vehicles. However they were found to effect the airflow into the ramjet intakes of the JTVand would have also got into the way of the radome of the missile which would have effected the guidance system had they been fitted on Bloodhound 1 (which on had to be locked on to the target before launch).
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