Women's Boxing Wales: Past, Present and Future
Date joined: 22/02/23
About
Women’s Boxing Wales: Past, Present and Future (WBW) is a sporting heritage project led by Dr Sarah Crews (University of South Wales) and funded by National Heritage Lottery Funding. The project seeks to document the experiences of female participants in Welsh boxing and celebrate the contributions they have made to the rich history of boxing in Wales. WBW seeks to better understand how and where women and girls have been involved in boxing, and where there are possibilities to support female athletes and participants now and in the future. This work began in 2018 when Sarah Crews and Ian Staples started to document the daily training rituals and routines of Lauren Price, Rosie Eccles and Lynsey Holdaway, as they prepared to represent Wales at the Commonwealth Games (Gold Coast, Queensland, Australia).
Between 2019 – 2023, Sarah Crews has been working with community boxing gyms in Newport, Cardiff and Neath to capture the experiences of female participants in these gyms. The WBW archive seeks to establish a cultural history of Welsh women’s boxing. It includes images and oral histories that span 1995 to present day. There is still a vast amount of work to do to preserve and better understand the diverse and expansive contributions that women and girls have made in and through Welsh boxing. The archive is available on People’s Collection Wales, and will develop as this project continues and engages perspectives from all areas of Wales.
Women’s Boxing Wales: Past, Present and Future aims to
- Increase the visibility of female participation in boxing
- Identify barriers to access in the sport for female participants at Elite, Amateur and recreational levels.
- Champion the contributions female participants have made to all areas of Welsh boxing
- Maintain and develop an interactive digital archive to preserve the history of women’s boxing in Wales.
The ambition is to showcase how and where women and girls belong (and always have done) in the cultural landscape of boxing in Wales.
