The Boat Race: Twenty Minutes That Take Over West London

About the Boat Race

The Boat Race is rowed between Oxford and Cambridge over the Championship Course on the tidal Thames in west London — four and a quarter miles from Putney to Mortlake. The first race was held on 10 June 1829 and it has been an annual fixture since 1856.

It lasts a little under twenty minutes. In that time roughly a quarter of a million people line the towpath between Putney and Mortlake, and the race is broadcast to an audience in the tens of millions, which is a remarkable ratio for an amateur event between two universities.

Why the Course Decides It

The Championship Course is not a straight line. It bends twice, which gives each station — Surrey and Middlesex — an advantage on a different part of the river, and the toss before the race is therefore genuinely consequential. Crews fight for the fastest water, which on a tidal river moves as the tide does.

The other variable is weather. The Tideway in late March or early April can be flat or it can be rough enough to sink a boat, which has happened. The race is one of very few elite sporting events where conditions can turn a contest into survival, and the umpire has the power to restart it.

Where to Start

• Decide between bank and launch early — the bank is the atmosphere, the launch is the race and only one of them needs arranging
• Plan around the tide, not the clock — the start time moves every year because it follows the tide
• Take the whole afternoon — the women’s race precedes the men’s, and both are worth watching
• Book west London for lunch — every table between Putney and Chiswick goes weeks ahead

A note on why the crowd is what it is. The race is free, it runs through residential west London on a Saturday or Sunday afternoon and the pubs along the towpath treat it as their biggest day of the year. That makes the towpath between Hammersmith and Chiswick genuinely enjoyable and genuinely impassable, and it means anything requiring a table needs to have been arranged weeks earlier.

The other thing worth knowing is how amateur it still is. The crews are students who have trained through an English winter on a tidal river in the dark, and neither university pays them. That is a large part of why the event has survived two centuries while most amateur sport has not.

For anyone treating the English spring as a season rather than a set of dates, the race sits naturally alongside Cheltenham in March and the Grand National in April, all three inside six weeks.

Where to Watch From

The bank is free and it is where the atmosphere is, particularly around Putney Bridge at the start and the Hammersmith pubs along the middle. What the bank does not give you is the race — from any fixed point you see perhaps thirty seconds of it.

The alternatives are a launch on the river following the crews, which is the only way to watch the whole thing, and hospitality at one of the clubs along the course. Both are arranged in advance and neither is available on the day. For most of our members the answer is a launch for the race and a club for everything either side of it.

How We Help

• A launch on the river following the crews, which is the only complete view of the race
• Hospitality at the clubs along the Championship Course
• Tables in Putney, Barnes or Chiswick on a day when west London is full, via our Fine Dining & Nightlife service
• Transport across a stretch of river with closed bridges and no parking
• The rest of the English spring calendar arranged around it — ask your Business Concierge

It is worth saying plainly that this is a free public event with a twenty-minute duration. What we arrange is not access, which anyone has, but the difference between standing in a crowd and following the race down the river with lunch at the end of it.