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RideLondon events raise over £600k for Surrey community groupsSurrey residents fume as closed roads trap them during RideLondon 100 (image Prudential RideLondon)

RideLondon events raise over £600k for Surrey community groups

Direct benefit to Surrey towns & villages from popular sportive
by John Stevenson
Tue, Aug 05, 2014 11:32
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Here's one in the eye for Surrey NIMBYs opposed to closed-road cycling events such as the Prudential RideLondon-Surrey 100 sportive. Last year's RideLondon festival raised over £600,000 for community groups in the county.

Last December, 10 Surrey groups were given more than £380,000 by the London Marathon Charitable Trust, which runs the Prudential RideLondon-Surrey events. Earlier this year another 30 groups pocketed over £242,000.

Benficiaries have included local sports organisations and cash-strapped parish councils.

Kingston has benefitted from a grant of £130,000 to fund the development of a closed-road cycling track, which will provide a safe place for local children and adults to ride their bikes.

Almost £9,500 was awarded to Hindhead Playing Fields Association, which hosts local football and cricket teams, for football coaching and new car park lights.

Chairman Chris Grimes said: “This award has really helped us to develop our clubs. Without it, there would be fewer people playing football and fewer youngsters involved in sport.”

A new playground has been built in Dormansland with the help of a £10,000 grant.

Parish council clerk Lynn Blake said: “The community is so grateful to the organisers for the funding for this new playground, and the kids love it.”

Windlesham Parish Council received £10,000 towards improving facilities at Lightwater Recreation Ground and options include an outdoor gym, play equipment for older children and a barbecue area.

Parish clerk Karen Holland said: “It will make a big difference. There’s nothing really in terms of free facilities in the village that people can use.”

Helyn Clack, Surrey County Council’s Cabinet Member for Community Services, said: “After the success of last year’s events, it’s great that so many lasting improvements are being made, underlining Prudential RideLondon’s legacy for Surrey communities and the economic boost the events bring.”

This year's weekend of riding kicks off on Saturday with the RideLondon FreeCycle mon Saturday August 9. For more details see the Prudential RideLondon website.

Got a project that deserves funding? Have a read of the grants page.

 

surrey
Prudential RideLondon-Surrey 100
NIMBYs
John Stevenson

John has been writing about bikes and cycling for over 30 years since discovering that people were mug enough to pay him for it rather than expecting him to do an honest day's work.

He was heavily involved in the mountain bike boom of the late 1980s as a racer, team manager and race promoter, and that led to writing for Mountain Biking UK magazine shortly after its inception. He got the gig by phoning up the editor and telling him the magazine was rubbish and he could do better. Rather than telling him to get lost, MBUK editor Tym Manley called John’s bluff and the rest is history.

Since then he has worked on MTB Pro magazine and was editor of Maximum Mountain Bike and Australian Mountain Bike magazines, before switching to the web in 2000 to work for CyclingNews.com. Along with road.cc founder Tony Farrelly, John was on the launch team for BikeRadar.com and subsequently became editor in chief of Future Publishing’s group of cycling magazines and websites, including Cycling Plus, MBUK, What Mountain Bike and Procycling.

John has also written for Cyclist magazine, edited the BikeMagic website and was founding editor of TotalWomensCycling.com before handing over to someone far more representative of the site's main audience.

He joined road.cc in 2013. He lives in Cambridge where the lack of hills is more than made up for by the headwinds.

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4 comments

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Airzound | 9 years ago
0 likes

Good idea but how about investing in cycling such as infrastructure or training? If the former is too bureaucratic then how about some good cycle parking lots more covered Sheffield stands or wider dedicated cycle lanes?

Yeah Wiggle and the like should be making significant donations to local causes as they are the main beneficiaries of such races sorry sportives.

Avatar
paddyirish | 9 years ago
0 likes

Good on them.

@Suffolk Cycling

IMG currently give local charities 1000% of the entry fee contribution they give to their headline charity in Etape Caledonia. 39

Avatar
Suffolk Cycling | 9 years ago
0 likes

I've often thought that charity sportives should automatically give a small portion of the cyclists' charity fees to one of the communities on its route.

So, using a local example, if a sportive raising money for cancer used Sutton village hall (near Woodbridge) as a feed/drink station, then a percentage of the entry/charity fees should be donated to some community project in Sutton (OAP lunch club, youth sport equipment etc).

A little pre and subsequent publicity in the local press would have three benefits:

1 Raise awareness of the actual ride to increase entries
2 Make some people think better of cyclists and mass-participation events
3 Make the beneficiary community really feel part of the sportive day.

So say you opted for a sportive option that meant £20 for the main charity, you did so on the understanding £2 of that (or whatever) went to the local charity as well.

I'd love to hear what AMR, Wiggle, CycleSwarm or some of the other sportive organisers think of this. 16

Avatar
dp24 | 9 years ago
0 likes

Yeah, but those bloody cyclists taking over our roads, and they don't even pay road tax, etc etc.

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