'I love Alnwick': Boxer helps put his home town in spotlight in National Lottery campaign

Alnwick boxer Cyrus Pattinson is showing off his hometown in a new National Lottery initiative which highlights good cause investment at a local level.
Cyrus PattinsonCyrus Pattinson
Cyrus Pattinson

The Olympic hopeful is one of six National Lottery funded athletes taking part in the My Hometown campaign.

The series explores how their upbringing inspired their sporting success and how support from the National Lottery has helped them and others in their local community.

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Cyrus, who hopes to make the Team GB 2020 Olympic squad, is filmed returning to Alnwick Amateur Boxing Club, where he trained as a youngster.

The club was set up by his uncle Gary with the help of a National Lottery grant from Sport England in 2012.

He then visits Alnwick’s historic market, which benefitted from a National Lottery grant in 1998 as part of The National Lottery Heritage Fund’s Conservation Area Partnership Scheme and talks warmly about growing up in the market town.

Cyrus said: “Alnwick will always be my home town and I could not have asked for a better place to grow up. It has a real tightly connected community where everyone supports and gets behind each other. I love Alnwick.

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“The market square is a historic part of Alnwick and I never realised that it had received National Lottery funding. That has opened my eyes and hopefully it will open a lot of other people’s too.

“Without support from The National Lottery, I couldn’t be doing what I am doing now. The National Lottery funded Alnwick ABC which means a lot to me as I can now see young people today benefitting from training and facilities that I didn’t have when I was growing up.

“When you play The National Lottery it feeds back into local communities like Alnwick and makes a massive difference.”

Jonathan Tuchner, from the National Lottery, added: “National Lottery players raise around £30 million each week for good causes across the UK.

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“Since 1994, 565,000 projects have benefitted from National Lottery support which is the equivalent of around 200 grants for every UK postcode district.”

“National Lottery players can be proud of the role they have played.”