New clubs: Special

How commercial outfits are changing the archery landscape.

Some of the more dynamic urban establishments have been changing the landscape of archery. How have they done it?

For as long as anyone can remember, archery has been based around clubs; the cauldron of most people’s archery experience, barring the usual first-try suspects of summer camps and fairgrounds. Clubs vary wildly across the UK and the world. There are a couple of semipro outfits with first-class indoor and outdoor facilities producing top level national shooters, to a handful of people plinking away of a Sunday afternoon in a council field, with a few bosses in a metal shed - and pretty much everything in between. In the UK at least, beginning and developing archery is essentially a ‘postcode lottery’. Whether you continue to develop in the sport is usually down to specific people, and volunteers at that. Many clubs restrict shooting to a handful of specific evenings or mornings, using shared facilities - again, with exceptions both indoor and outdoor. A further element of clubs is that, by definition, you have to join, and follow the established traditions and rules, which does not suit everyone.

If you’re reading this magazine, you are no doubt well aware that developing into a good archer is a long, slow, and demanding process. Archery is occasionally compared to learning a martial art (and indeed it is a martial art, under the technical definition of the term). But we also live in an era where the rising profile of archery in popular culture in the last ten years, together with the tentpoles of three fully-televised Olympic Games, has led to an explosion of casual interest in the target side of the sport, and a demand to try it.

There have been fully commercial ranges for many years around the world, and in the UK at least, several of the ranges attached to the larger archery dealers fit that definition, in the sense you can turn up and pay to shoot.

For this issue we are going to look at three of the newer commercial ranges: Archery Fit in London, Gotham Archery in New York, and Archery Legends, attached to Merlin in Loughborough. All three are doing something different in their respective locations (or ‘markets’, if you like), but perhaps more importantly, all are doing something that traditional clubs simply do not do.