This Is Us

"It was about the end of 2004 or early 2005. I had been working on the renewal of Chinatown for a few years in a couple of different jobs. I spent a lot of time with Christine, who was - and still is - a key figure in everything. We would often sit and talk things through over tea. Over one cup of tea I was lamenting that Gareth and I had been unable to find a suitable place in the West End to practice our martial arts training together. 'Why don't you use the Community Centre?' Christine offered. And that was it.

Pretty soon we were clearing away the tables after the old people's lunch club (which lasted all afternoon!), sweeping down the concrete floors, and spending the evening training. After a while, we put a hand written notice on the door: 'Black Belt Training. Free.' A few people came, and many weren't black belts but just interested. Things really took off when we started to teach the Community Centre staff. Joe Hung was first, and then some others including Susanna Fung. Susanna led the youth project, and one day someone asked if we would teach the youngsters from the project. Word got round then, and people would come by word of mouth. Xin Leng asked if he could bring a friend who wasn't Chinese, and that was how we met Jon.

In 2008 I left my job in London, but continued to teach in Chinatown. By then the Chinatown classes had gone from what we called 'freestyle martial arts' (they would call it MMA now) to a traditional TaeKwonDo class with help from Master John W. Swift. Helen and Drew had been martial artists for a long time by then, and at that time Gareth, Drew, Helen and I started to teach TaeKwonDo near where we lived in the Cotswolds and Worcestershire. The original Chinatown class, and some of those original Cotswolds classes, are still running.

In 2010 we added Ensodo, which is a circular art with a lot of weapons, and is designed for older students. I would teach Ensodo students Tai Chi and Qigong as part of their training, and both Joe Aspey, who went on to become an Ensodo Instructor, and TKD Grand Master Jason Wadley, suggested we start public classes for these. So that began in 2013.

Early on Helen and I were developing our own long standing weapons training, and we had started to bring Bujutsu into our teaching, inlcuding making it a formal part of Ensodo. In 2012 we held a weapons day and invited Sensei Taran McCarnun to teach Iaido for part of that day. It was a huge success, and from that point on I was on a journey into traditional Japanese sword arts. This culminated in us becoming one of the inaugural dojos when Mugai Ryu Meishi Ha was introduced into the UK in 2014. Ten years later, we started to teach Ikikai Iaido, which is a Qi-filled Iaido style, really contemplative and flowing, and very Zen.

Alongside that, from 2016, was SAMA Kickboxing, which Drew had developed. It is very informal and has a really strong practical self defence perspective to it - a bit like our early days in Chinatown.

I have been immersed in East Asian philosophies for many decades, and often taught workshops and courses on subjects like Confucianism, Daoism and Zen, as well as philosophical topics like Li and Qi. Over the years this aspect of my own work has grown, and it was really nice to recognise this by formally adding the Zendo philosophies teaching to our Enso group in 2024.

Now, LCTKD is the biggest and longest established martial arts school in London Chinatown. People tell me it is amongst the top 5% of martial arts schools in the country. We have hundreds of students and dozens of Instructors, and people know us all over the world - there's even opportunities for our students to train around the world, which is wonderful. All down to that cup of tea!

That's really nice, but I want to say that although it grew up as a martial arts school, LCTKD is much more than that today. When people think of a martial arts school, they think of a group of mostly men in a closed space in Chinatown furiously fighting each other - just like we were when we started! Or maybe a big group of kids in white suits in a leisure centre all flying around and shouting. But now we teach in all sorts of places, to people of all sorts of ages. Half of our students are female, and while we do actually have kids flying around classes (which are fun!), most of our students are adults. And while all 8 of our arts are traditional arts and deeply embedded in martial arts, half of them don't involve any fighting at all.

That's a really big thing. Just stop and go over that again. Half of our 8 arts don't involve any fighting at all. Arts like Tai Chi and Iaido are about experiencing something very special about our bodies, our minds and our spirit.

Another thing that sets us apart is that in all of the arts we help students to explore - really explore - the cultural and philosophical aspects of what they are learning. TaeKwonDo students learn about Confucianism, Tai Chi students about Daoism, Iaido students about Zen. That has been a big part of my own journey and is very much what I believe in.

So is it a lot of disparate things? No. I spent a lot of time bringing together the 8 arts to give us a near complete circle (they would call that an Enso in Japanese). Students can study more than one art, and move from one to another as their journey changes. Not only does this give a real path for our students and teachers, it also means that the arts draw on insight from each other, because students and teachers who do more than one art with us spread their understanding across from one to another, making everyone's understanding of what they do so much more. I teach several arts at the same time in our "open dojo" concept, and I often find students who study different arts in deep conversation, fascinated by what they can learn from each other's art.

I don't know of any other organisation that does what we do and it makes us truly unique. We almost defy description. Try putting all that down into one sentence!

Talking of defying description, that's actually a thing when it comes to the name. This mysterious 'LCTKD.' When we began, we didn't have a name. It didn't seem we needed one. When we moved to formal TaeKwonDo classes in Chinatown, and put up a notice, we needed to find something to call it on the notice, so we called it London Chinatown Tae Kwon Do. As that was a bit of a mouthful, people always just said LCTKD. The name stuck. So even after we had been teaching lots of things in lots of places, and even though having a name that was really only about TaeKwonDo was sort of confusing, we just kept it. We like it. It reminds us of where we come from."