Huntingdon Canoe Club is a friendly club, accomodating most levels of paddler.
The club is based in Hinchingbrooke Country Park. It has been in existence for over 40 years and is affiliated to British Canoeing. We recently achieved the Sport England Quality Mark (formerly Clubmark) status. The club is run by a small group of loyal volunteers, we are inclusive and we support local community groups and members from Huntingdon / Cambridgeshire and surrounding areas.

Following a recent spate of thefts and damage at the club we are raising £10,000 to help fund replacement of the club’s changing rooms and to secure the compound by replacing its fence.

We have had several break ins where boats are lifted over the fence and left floating on the lake, stolen or sunk, each time we have endeavoured to increase security, first we got long wires, chains and padlocks, then we got a second container and moved most of our boats in there, then after more damage we reinforced the fence in several places where it had been vandalised, after a further theft all we have moved all the boats to a friendly farmers shed .

Recently there was a further serious vandalism but what is the most heartbreaking is that they have smashed up our changing room with bricks, and to do that they had to rip the safety mesh off the windows and must have brought the bricks from somewhere else.

Now we feel we will struggle to attract new members, the kids at the club are endangered from the broken glass & detritus in the grass, we are supposed to be running taster sessions but those people may be put off by the poor state of our premises. It will be difficult to change in dark boarded up changing rooms.

We looked into a grant from Sport England but unfortunately after much deliberation they advised they were unable to fund our facilities because there was no running water or power onsite.

Overall we are looking to buy something like green palisade fencing to renew the fence and gate around the club and get a new changing room made of something resilient like an old metal container with metal shutters to go over the windows

I plead that the local community can come together to assist us.

If you are inspired to try paddling you can support us by coming for a taster session or becoming a member, find us on facebook https://www.facebook.com/HuntingdonCanoeClub/