A portrait of the UK’s oldest boxing club

Just left of Bethnal Green station, at London’s East End, Repton Boxing Club sits nuzzled between two public fields. Set in a red brick former bathhouse, its entrance features green indicatory placards and a gold inscription on the right-hand entry door: ​“NO GUTS NO GLORY.”

The club has stood since 1884 and is widely considered to be England’s oldest boxing club. It’s also one of London’s most famed sports institutions – home to dozens of Olympians, world medallists, and icons of the ring, like welterweight world champion John H. Stracey, commonwealth champion Darren Barker, super-heavyweight gold medalist Audley Harrison and junior middleweight champion Maurice Hope. 

Its culture, according to many of Repton’s own, has remained consistent as long as it’s existed: it’s a hard-edged, traditional, competitive gym. No guts, no glory. And Repton coaches train their boys in accordance – chief among them the famed Tony Burns, who coached fighters for over 60 years in the gym before his passing in 2021. With over a century of acclaimed history, the air in the club is rich – and to some, stale. In Learning the Ropes, a new documentary about the club which aims to preserve its legendary reputation, one young fighter who currently trains at Repton says you can feel the history lingering in the gym: ​“Repton is old and traditional, and it smells of it.”

• Read next: Warm, tender photos of London’s amateur boxing scene

For 39-year-old Ryan Pickard, writer and director of Learning the Ropes, its lore as a hard-edged classical gym is both Repton’s superpower and its flaw. ​“Repton Boxing Club is a gym that’s for competition only,” he says. ​“You’re either game for competition, or you’re not welcome.” This is a philosophy Pickard railed against when he created his own 12×3 Boxing Club, which opened in Aldgate in 2018. Unlike Repton, 12×3 accommodates everyone. But there was something in Repton’s 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 guts).

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 low-cost barrier to entry. Most of the boxing community, including him, says Pickard, is from working class backgrounds. 

By 13, the Waltham Abbey native was a national champion and selected for the England team, for whom he fought for over a decade. He won a junior world silver medal at age 17 in Romania, a commonwealth gold medal in Australia, a European 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, was Repton.

“I knew him intimately. He was like family to me,” says Pickard, who centred the brusque coach in Learning the Ropes. ​“He didn’t give away love easily, but that’s just down to perception.”

• Read next: Eating concrete with London Skate Mums

It may seem, Pickard explains, like coach Burns was only interested in winners: those with the obvious physical acumen to win a gold medal for the club. But this wasn’t close to the truth, says Pickard. Burns invested generous sums of time and wisdom in fighters who he saw ​“digging deep and trying to overcome whatever parameters had been put on them”, Pickard says. ​“They weren’t willing to accept the ceiling they’d been given. Burns still gave them such respect because he saw them.” Burns’ emphasis on character extended in the opposite direction, too. Pickard recalls a day when one (unnamed) Olympic gold medalist made an arrogant show in the gym and Burns exiled him until he returned with a humble apology in pocket. 

Pickard is reluctant to talk about his own ​“ceilings”. He’s cagey about his upbringing, which raises questions about whether it’s because he can’t find the words or because they’d be too tender to relay. ​“When you grow up in a rough area or background,” he offers eventually, ​“you get humiliated along the way, and it puts you in your shell – I’m no exception to that rule.”

One of Repton’s other coaches, Gary McCarthy, says in the film that most people perceive boxing as a sport for the tough, but boxers are sensitive people. For Pickard, Mike Tyson’s success wasn’t in his brute strength or God-given speed, it was in his mental capacity, his willingness to be open to growth and push himself through his ceiling. That’s what made a man into a legend.

• Read next: Inside the UK’s only licensed bare knuckle fight club

The persevering ethos of the sport was at Repton’s beating heart. Money, on the other hand, didn’t touch its centre. Pickard says this is why Repton is such a beautiful place: it is run by volunteers, and no cash changes hands. ​“There’s many people in boxing now that are trying to take the reins of the sport, and it’s all about money,” says Pickard. One of Repton’s most poignant lessons to offer the next generation of the sport, which Pickard relays in Learning the Ropes, is that there are no passionless successful boxers.

As important as it was to Pickard to suspend in time this definitive moment in boxing culture, it is also important to him to let it go. He is not overly sentimental about the hard-edged history of the sport, which Repton represents. Pickard understands that to move forward, boxing culture must evolve to include more people from different walks of life. In Learning the Ropes, he captured the spirit of the era just to turn around and set it free. The film is a love letter to the club and mentors who shaped him and thousands of other athletes, yes, but it’s also a call to evaluative judgment. Here is a window into the history of London’s boxing scene: tough, triumphant, male. A paradigm. A lifeline. How things have always been. But beyond the screen, there is also a door, kicked wide open, before which lies the sport’s future. 

Learning the Ropes premiered at the BFI Southbank on March 31.

Sydney Lobe is a freelance journalist. Follow her on Instagram.

Buy your copy of Huck 83 here.

Enjoyed this article? Follow Huck on Instagram for more from the cutting edge of sport, music and counterculture.

Support stories like this by becoming a member of Club Huck.