Our school in the South East has come a long way. It was started on a whim in 2016 when we wanted to expand Wave. We were then called ChiswickBJJ and so not only did we add another school, we also had to change the name. So let's look at the history of our school in Elephant.
Our first logo
Before we opened a second school in Elephant & Castle, we used to be called ChiswickBJJ, once we opened the second school we had three options, either we keep the name ChiswickBJJ and impose it on the South East, we call the second school Elephant&CastleBJJ which didn't quite have a nice ring to it, or we change the name. So after staring at the old logo long and hard we decided to call it... WaveBJJ. The original logo was designed by Keith Goodenough and was really hard to replace. We will come to this later in the story as we didn't have a new logo for ages.
Jean Noel showing off our new space.
We started our Elephant and Castle in February 2016 at The Artworks which is a temporary venue that was built to accommodate businesses during the redevelopment of the area. It was the first place Lorenzo saw and he fell in Love with the venue. The gallery matched the feel of the club and lent itself to a space to grow into. We brought the mats from Chiswick and set to work on growing the classes here. To begin with it mainly consisted of people coming down from Chiswick. As the venue had a lot of footfall it soon attracted the locals and began to grow.
Steve pre beard
One by one the club started to grow. it felt like the start at Chiswick only there was a lot more free marketing just by being at The Artworks. Another reason is that what WaveBJJ likes to do as much as training is socialising, and the venue was slap bang in between two bars and some great little restaurants/streetfood vendors. So as we always do we chatted drank and laughed.
Beer!
As Elephant has grown we have brought in new instructors to help out which brought new techniques and new conversations with some great talent.
With Joanna, Nima, Muuji and Richard the team keeps growing.
We look forward to great things from our South East branch with big changes coming soon.
