The Alpine Club, the world’s first mountaineering club, was founded in 1857.  For over 150 years, members have been at the leading edge of worldwide mountaineering development and exploration. 

With membership, experienced and aspiring alpinists benefit from a varied meets programme, regional lectures with notable guest speakers, reduced rates at many alpine huts, opportunity to apply for grants to support expeditions, significant discounts at many UK retailers, extensive networking contacts, access to the AC Library and maps - and more! 

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Leading Through - The Next 6 Years

Priorities, Plans and Projects for the Alpine Club following Blencathra 2024.

In 2018, the Alpine Club, under the leadership of John Porter, began quite an extraordinary process. It dedicated itself to a programme whereby, every six years, it would bring together its members for a large-scale consultation, assessing its organisational health, its relevance and its priorities for the future.

Informed by the feedback from its members following the 2018 event, held at the Blencathra Field Studies Centre in the Lake District, the AC began a journey which, among other developments, has seen the Club rapidly expand its meets programme, provide increasing opportunities for member development and commit itself to growing its digital offering.

When we met for the second ever Blencathra event in November 2024, it was astonishing to consider how much the Club had changed in the preceding six years; cementing significant progress despite the added challenges of the Covid-19 pandemic. There was a sense from attendees that the Club was travelling in the right direction and an enthusiasm to build upon the progress that had already been made.

As well as broader discussions about the AC and the mountaineering world at large, the event focused on five major topic areas – Membership, Our Values, Publications, Heritage and The Soul of the Club – with some consistent priorities emerging across these subjects.

The weekend was alive with ideas, as much in the downtime between formal sessions as in the discussions themselves. We have pulled together some of the clearest priorities and most widely-supported ideas below.

 


The Blencathra Field Studies Centre - Iain Young

AC President Simon Richardson introducing the weekend - Iain Young

Membership

The Club currently has more than 1,500 members and is attracting increasing numbers of women and younger members thanks to a dedicated focus on broadening our appeal. This was felt to be a healthy size for the Club and efforts to widen our membership through Younger Members' Meets, opportunities for development like the Rick Allen Skills Award and the revitalised ACG, were welcomed. The committee are dedicated to working to maintain our numbers, while continuing to increase the diversity of our membership so that it better reflects the mountaineering community at large.

Some newer members expressed how they had initially found the Club to be intimidating as an institution. We have already made some changes to our events at Charlotte Road to reduce these barriers and will be investigating other ways to actively make new and prospective members feel more welcome at their first Club events.

All the AC events discussed at Blencathra are built on an incredible foundation of voluntary effort and there was a real appetite amongst attendees for more opportunities to become involved in the Club. The committee is already considering the creation of a Volunteer Officer to help encourage and support volunteers. Additionally, we are looking at ways to regularly advertise volunteering opportunities.

 

Our Values

One of the great successes of 2018’s Blencathra was the creation of the AC Green Group, which has advised the Club on environmental matters and set out Club positions relating to travel and climate change. Sadly, in more recent years, the Green Group has been less active and there was a strong desire among attendees to see it reinvigorated. Happily, volunteers to help make this a reality have already come forward and this process has begun. Watch this space!

There was a general consensus that the Club’s mission statement was in need of a small update and the committee will bring this into review. It was also felt that we should continue to make a positive case for the Club’s values through our communications and by reviving the Spirit of Mountaineering Award, which recognises those who selflessly come to the aid of others in the mountains.

Lastly, there was an appetite for the Club to function as a hub for ‘lessons learned’ when accidents or near-misses occur in the mountains. The exact scope of this potential project and how it would interact with existing systems run by other organisations is currently being considered.

 

 

Publications

Throughout the weekend there was a real sense of pride in the Club’s literary legacy but also a degree of regret that it had not remained active in the guidebooks space. As an immediate priority, the Club will be continuing its work to digitise its existing guidebooks, creating an online database which will be made available to members and which can serve as the basis for future progress in this area.

In addition, the work to complete the updated Himalayan Index, a potentially colossal resource for exploratory mountaineers, continues apace, with project lead Lina Arthur recruiting 20 additional volunteers in the period following Blencathra.

The Alpine Journal and Club Newsletter remain valued publications and there was an eagerness from members to suggest potential new areas of focus for future editions. Similarly to the nervousness some members felt when first attending AC events, there was also an occasional reticence from some members to submit to the Journal and Newsletter. We will be working to demystify this process and to consolidate the excellent work done by Ed Douglas in encouraging more women to write for the Journal.

 

Heritage

From those not already involved with the Club’s collections, there was tangible excitement in learning about the literature, photographs, artefacts and art which the Club holds. We need to spread this awareness more widely, to the membership and the public at large, by making greater use of digital communications and novel forms of presentation to showcase our collections. This will be a key priority for the Library in the coming years, with the groundwork already laid by our hard-working Librarian Emma McDonald.

A perennial problem for our collections is storage. The Club’s premises have limited capacity to store and display heritage items, especially when the demands of work and meeting space are factored in. We will examine ways to make better use of our space and to free up storage by loaning out items to other museums and collections. Our incoming Honorary Secretary, Charlie Burbridge, is already investigating one potential avenue for this.

To ensure that challenges like the issue of space are responded to more proactively in the future, it was recommended that the Club seek to establish a Heritage Board to help coordinate the custodianship, development and showcasing of its collections. Discussions about how this Board will work are already underway.

 

Summit smiles on the 2024 Aspirants Meet

 

The Soul of the Club

This final topic might initially appear to be the most nebulous of those discussed, but it actually led to a number of extremely practical suggestions.

The annual Aspirants’ Meet in Sass Fee was singled out for particular praise for the way in which it fostered a sense of community. To build on the work of Nick Hurndall Smith and his team, it was felt that the Club should seek to find locations throughout the Alps in which to base itself for the summer, creating hubs where AC members know they can find each other during the season. The committee is already discussing what is required to make this a reality.

In recent years, the Club has run a number of symposia. These, it was agreed, are a great way of encouraging networking and promoting a sense of belonging. The committee will continue its support for these events in the coming years and investigate potential new topics such as destination-focused sessions.

The Club’s renewed focussing on supporting member development was welcomed and the committee will be making available a complete overview of all our development opportunities in the near future so that members at all levels can see how they can access guidance and support.

 

Conclusion

These, we hope you’ll agree, are an incredible range of priorities for the Club to work on over the next six years. There is a huge amount that needs to be done in order to make them a success, but if we can do so, the Club will continue to thrive, serving both its members and the wider mountaineering community.

The Club is the sum total of its membership, and our successes, like those we achieve in the mountains, are the result of our collective endeavour. If you’d like to help us make any of these projects a reality, in however small a way, we’d love to hear from you. You can fill out our new AC Volunteer Form and a member of the AC team will be in touch to find out more about how you’d like to be involved.

Finally, the Club would like to thank Sherry Macliver whose organisational work helped to make Blencathra 2024 a reality and Iain Young, our fantastic facilitator from the Scottish Mountaineering Club who lent an invaluable outsider’s eye to proceedings.