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Wing Chun is relatively new to the UK and if you’re lucky enough to have a local school, you should definitely make the effort! Before I found Wing Chun in the early 1990’s I had tried several other martial arts. I had never heard of Wing Chun, despite being a huge Bruce Lee fan!
I had trained in Judo as a child and Karate and Taekwondo later on. But something was always missing. As a Bruce Lee fan, I noticed something different in the movements in his movies. In comparison, the styles I was training seemed to be missing something.
Wing Chun Was Different
When I first started learning Wing Chun I knew immediately that it was something I wanted to pursue. The lightness of touch of my Sifu was inspiring. It was illusive and hard to grasp. The training was different to that of my former styles too. I had intended to pursue Karate after a change of city but couldn’t find a school of the style. Then I found TaeKwonDo, which was similar and then Wing Chun Kung Fu.
I moved Cities after 2 years of solid Wing Chun practice and was determined to continue my Wing Chun studies. However, it wasn’t to be and I found Wing Chun was a rarity back in the 1990’s. Although many places purported to teach Wing Chun, they were using the name as a sales pitch without much actual knowledge of the art, if any.
I had of course been spoiled because I’d stumbled upon one of only two UK representatives of Ip Chun (son on Ip Man) in the UK. The two at the time were Sifu Colin Ward and Sifu Shaun Rawcliffe. Of course today it’s very different. In part this is a good thing with more knowledge being shared. But unfortunately unqualified teachers open schools all over the place despite the them never having completed the system, (or even completed more than a couple of years worth of training). This gives Wing Chun a bad name and I’ve heard many a conversation of people knocking the art.
A Long Commute
So because I couldn’t find another Wing Chun school comparable to the one I had found, I commuted to it weekly from 70 miles away! The only reason we even have Wing Chun classes nearby today, is because previous students travelled to Hong Kong from the UK to learn directly from the masters. We are so lucky today to have a wealth of information at our fingertips. But it’s sad that people won’t travel from one city to another (from even 5 miles away) to learn this amazing style when our elders traveled continents to learn this fascinating art!
Since 2021, I have been studying with Instructor Dan Parr of Sheffield Wing Chun school “Sung Wing Chun“. Dan is a Hong Kong qualified instructor from the Chu Shong Tin lineage. Chu Shong Tin was Ip Man’s third student and taught the art for 5 decades. Despite Ip Chun and Chu Shong Tin having both learned from Ip Man, there’s a remarkable difference in the hand patterns (forms) and training methodology. You can understand this better through this video, which explains some of the differences applied by Chu Shong Tin in his teachings.
