parkrun marks millionth event where it all began in Bushy Park
Bushy Park hosted parkrun’s millionth event, 22 years after 13 runners and five volunteers started a movement that now reaches 23 countries.
Bushy Park, where parkrun began with a handful of runners in 2004, became the stage for the movement’s one-millionth event. The milestone landed where the first Bushy Park Time Trial was run on 2 October 2004, turning a local experiment into a weekly fixture now spread across more than 2,800 locations in 23 countries.
parkrun says the model has grown to more than 12 million registrations and now draws an average of 500,000 people each weekend across its Saturday 5k and Sunday junior events. At Bushy parkrun, Dame Kelly Holmes and comedian Joe Wilkinson joined founder Paul Sinton-Hewitt and chief executive Elizabeth Duggan as the organisation marked the occasion and launched its #ThanksAMillion campaign to support the next million events.
The scale of the change is stark when set against the beginning. The first-ever event in Bushy Park drew 18 people, while the original time trial that preceded it was organised by 13 runners and five volunteers. parkrun says those early results were logged with pen and paper, and finish tokens came from washers bought at a local hardware store. From that small, improvised start, the movement has recorded more than 138 million finish-funnel crossings and 16 million instances of volunteering.
The anniversary also underlined parkrun’s public-health pitch. Sinton-Hewitt said the first Bushy Park event was never expected to become the first of one million worldwide, while Duggan pointed to the organisation’s reach into less active and lower socio-economic communities. parkrun says nearly 20% of new sign-ups register as inactive, and more than one in five participants come from the lowest socio-economic communities, a reminder that a free event does not automatically reach every neighbourhood or every resident.
That question of access sits at the centre of parkrun’s next phase. The charity is aiming for 25% of new events to be in areas of greatest need by 2030, up from 20% now, while parkrun primary continues to broaden school-based registrations. parkrun says those school registrations are twice as ethnically diverse, at 20%, as other registrations, at 10%.
What began as a local run in Bushy Park has become a permanent piece of exercise infrastructure for hundreds of thousands each weekend. The millionth event marked not just a milestone, but the continuing test of whether a free, volunteer-run model can keep expanding into the places that need it most.
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