Our lovely son Christian, who died so unexpectedly on Boxing Day 2017, at the age of 17, loved boxing. It gave him self-discipline, self-respect, physical strength and inner confidence. He was a member of Heart of England Community Boxing Club based in Hinckley, Leicestershire, where he trained two to three times a week. The club was evicted from its premises shortly before Christian's death and is now based in a derelict factory. We are fundraising in Christian's memory to help Heart of England Community Boxing Club develop and build a brand new gym in Hinckley which will be named after Christian.

We hope to build in Hinckley a new, world class amateur boxing facility, the finest in Britain, which will be of sufficient quality to attract national teams to use it as a training facility, provide an elite facility at regional level, and to be a location from which the sport of disability boxing can be created, developed and performed.

To give you a real flavour of the project and the scale of its ambition, watch Nick Griffin, Head Coach, who coached Christian, talking about it in a short video in the following link (highlight the following link, right click, and go to the web address to view).

https://vimeo.com/677374927/9145158add

Every single penny counts, we still need to raise more money to build the gym.  We need everyone to keep doing what they have done to date to help raise the funds. There have been amazing fundraising efforts already, and in my updates below we try to recognise many of them.

Updates on the project will appear on this page as the project develops and we want to thank from the bottom of our hearts all those amazing people from far and wide who have donated already and gone to such extraordinary lengths to get wheels on the project to date, as well as those who find this page and consider the cause a worthy one to which to contribute. Christian would be so honoured and delighted that this is being done in his name. The gym will allow so many others to benefit from boxing's gifts to those who participate in the sport, as we saw Christian benefit, and it will be an outstanding community asset for the community of Hinckley, the wider boxing community regionally, nationally and internationally, and the community of those who have disabilities and want to participate in the sport of boxing but are currently unable to do so.The gym's name will also be a lasting memorial to our lovely boy.

Thank you for your support, from Christian's parents Caspar and Louise Hobbs and from Isobel, Christian's sister.

#everypennycounts

#buildthegym