Peterborough City
Rowing Club
on-line
Club Details - [Where ? What ? When ?]
Peterborough City Rowing Club applied for planning permission to extend
their clubroom and changing area in 1971. Permission was refused and the club discovered
that as part of the City expansion plan a new road was penciled in through the boathouse.
The expansion plans were put away and the money spent on boats.
Nine years later a contact reported that consideration was being given to producing a lake
for rowing. It turned out later that the new road scheduled to affect the boathouse would
be carried across the river by a new bridge and embankment across a flood plain. The
presence of the embankment would affect flood storage and the river authority required an
additional 15 acres of new flood storage upstream of the new bridge. One method of
providing this was to construct a balancing lake. The Development Corporation planners
were looking at possible recreation use in advance of actual design of the lake. The
planners had approached the local Sports Council for advice on possible water sports to
take advantage of this situation. The Sports Council have four different sports each year
that have extra emphasis. At this time one of the sports was rowing. The Chairman of the
local Sports Council (who had no connection with rowing) responded to the Development
Corporation request with a suggestion of rowing. The club captain managed to contact the
planner responsible for the project and the captain and I made an appointment to discuss
the concept. The planner had contacted the ARA and received the booklet on 'Developing a
Rowing Course' produced by the Courses Committee. The dimensions of an international
course had frightened the planners and the project was effectively pigeon-holed. The area
of land readily available could only accommodate about 1000m in length and the natural
water level was 1m below the surface. This meant 1m of excavation to reach the water
surface, then excavation to produce the required depth of water. An area of land close by
which had been used as the fly ash tip area from the local Power Station (now defunct)
could be used for spoil tipping thus retaining the spoil on site and reducing costs. There
was gravel on site but 3 to 5.5m of light alluvial silt on top and it would not be
economic to extract the gravel.
Taken from an article by John Buchan ...
The club has 3 major events on the lake every year:
The Peterborough Junior 14 Regatta - [ Late June ]
The Peterborough Regatta - [ Early June ]
The Peterborough Summer Regatta - [ Middle August ]
The last two events take place over a weekend, the first day sees the 1000m events,
while the sunday has the 500m sprint events.
The Club also has the Peterborough Head of Nene event which takes place in the winter season normally in February. The normal format is a one division rolling start race over approximately 2500m of the river, from the 'house' to the key theatre.
Club Details
Where it is, what its got and When all this
happened.