{"id":702496,"date":"2026-05-29T16:05:22","date_gmt":"2026-05-29T16:05:22","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/702496\/"},"modified":"2026-05-29T16:05:22","modified_gmt":"2026-05-29T16:05:22","slug":"a-portrait-of-the-uks-oldest-boxing-club","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/702496\/","title":{"rendered":"A portrait of the UK\u2019s oldest boxing club"},"content":{"rendered":"

For 39-year-old Ryan Pickard, writer and director of\u00a0Learning the Ropes<\/a>, its lore as a\u00a0hard-edged classical gym is both Repton\u2019s superpower and its flaw. \u200b\u201cRepton Boxing Club is a\u00a0gym that\u2019s for competition only,\u201d he says. \u200b\u201cYou\u2019re either game for competition, or you\u2019re not welcome.\u201d This is a\u00a0philosophy Pickard railed against when he created his own 12\u00d73 Boxing Club<\/a>, which opened in Aldgate in 2018. Unlike Repton, 12\u00d73 accommodates everyone. But there was something in Repton\u2019s unyielding character that stayed with Pickard, who joined the club at age seven and competed until he was 23, compelling him to document the infamous gym in all its glory (and\u00a0guts).<\/p>\n

Repton Boxing Club evolved from Repton Boys Club, which the Repton School in Derbyshire created to help underprivileged young men at the school to defend themselves. In time, it became an egalitarian training facility with a\u00a0low-cost barrier to entry. Most of the boxing community, including him, says Pickard, is from working class backgrounds.\u00a0<\/p>\n

By 13, the Waltham Abbey native was a\u00a0national champion and selected for the England team, for whom he fought for over a\u00a0decade. He won a\u00a0junior world silver medal at age 17\u00a0in Romania<\/a>, a\u00a0commonwealth gold medal in Australia, a\u00a0European bronze in Hungary, and was captain of team England multiple times. At the helm of his success was the one and only coach Tony Burns, who, if you ask Pickard,\u00a0was Repton.<\/p>\n

\u201cI knew him intimately. He was like family to me,\u201d says Pickard, who centred the brusque coach in Learning the Ropes. \u200b\u201cHe didn\u2019t give away love easily, but that\u2019s just down to perception.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"For 39-year-old Ryan Pickard, writer and director of\u00a0Learning the Ropes, its lore as a\u00a0hard-edged classical gym is both…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":702497,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[571],"tags":[342012,64,63,342011,802,342008,10970,1691,3262,342009,1571,342007,342013,135239,59906,342010,15139,85],"class_list":["post-702496","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-boxing","tag-asking","tag-au","tag-australia","tag-bethnal","tag-boxing","tag-chronicles","tag-club","tag-documentary","tag-green","tag-hard-edged","tag-history","tag-pickard","tag-poignant","tag-present","tag-questions","tag-repton","tag-ryan","tag-sports"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/702496","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=702496"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/702496\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/702497"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=702496"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=702496"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=702496"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}