The London 2 Paris Rowing Challenge is a unique and highly demanding endurance race between two of the world's greatest cities, using matched boats, contested every two years between teams of twelve people. 

The race route goes down the Thames, across the English Channel, and then up the Seine from Le Havre to Paris, finishing opposite the Eiffel Tower at Pont D'Iena.  Completing the course takes approximately a week, and covers a distance of 420 nautical miles.

Each team consists of twelve oarsmen, with up to seven in the boat at any one time (six rowers and one cox).  The boats are matched Thames Watermen's Cutters, fixed seat boats that are suitable for the challenges of rowing in the open sea.

Thanks for taking the time to visit my JustGiving page.

I am raising money for Longridge-on-the-Thames. Please give as generously as you can.

Longridge is a centre of inspiration and excellence for the advancement of education in water, outdoor and indoor activities for young people of all backgrounds and abilities. Our activities and operation is designed to promote the development of young people who use the site as staff, volunteers or visitors allowing them to achieve their full physical, intellectual, social and spiritual potential as individuals, as responsible citizens and as members of their local, national and international communities.

For more young people to benefit from our activities we need to reinvigorate our facilities, which currently are tired, old, prone to flooding and in most cases just too small to service our existing visitors—let alone new ones! New facilities will encourage more adult and corporate use and this use will underwrite the activities for young people; in a nutshell the more businesses that use us the cheaper our provision will be to youth groups.

We have been awarded a £1m grant from Sports England and £156k from National Sports Foundation, which will enable us to start the development of the centre but we need your help to complete it. We urgently need to raise an additional £200,000 to complete the building of our new training centre, which will enable us to equp the training rooms and create best-in-class disabled facilities, ensuring that our activities remain fully inclusive.

All of our building projects will firstly have a function that will benefit and support the development of young people. However, they will have additional revenue streams, that will underwrite the use of the new facility by young people.

We also need to pay off the £800,000 loan that we took out to purchase the freehold of the site from The Scout Association, more about the campaigns to achieve our aims are detailed on the following pages. If you would like to know more about Longridge, our aims for the centre or how you can best support our plans, contact our Centre Director, Amanda Foister, amanda.foister@longridge-uk.org.

Donating through JustGiving is simple, fast and totally secure. Your details are safe with JustGiving – they’ll never sell them on or send unwanted emails. Once you donate, they’ll send your money directly to the charity and make sure Gift Aid is reclaimed on every eligible donation by a UK taxpayer. So it’s the most efficient way to donate - I raise more, whilst saving time and cutting costs for the charity.

So please dig deep and donate now.