Hotels for The Boat Race 2027

The Oxford–Cambridge Boat Race is one of the great occasions of the British sporting calendar — eight miles of head-to-head racing from Putney to Mortlake on the tidal Thames, watched by a quarter of a million lining the riverbanks and millions more on television. The 2027 race is confirmed for Sunday 11 April, a date that also marks 100 years since the first Women's Boat Race.

The atmosphere along the Chiswick and Hammersmith banks on race day is festive and free — anyone can watch from the river's edge. Hotels in west London fill for the weekend, so book ahead. Stay in Putney, Hammersmith or Chiswick and you can walk to your chosen stretch of the course and catch both the men's and women's races.

The Boat Race began in 1829, when Cambridge student Charles Merivale challenged his old school friend Charles Wordsworth, by then at Oxford, to a race between the two universities — run, that first year, not on the tidal Thames but upriver at Henley. Oxford won comfortably, and the fixture returned only sporadically before becoming an annual event and eventually settling on the championship course from Putney to Mortlake.

In nearly two centuries of racing there has been only one dead heat, in 1877, when the judge could not separate the two crews at the line; it remains the closest official result the race has ever produced. Today's course, the crowds along the Chiswick and Hammersmith banks and the free public vantage points all descend from that first, much smaller contest at Henley.