Expect ‘beer ‘n’ cheer’ as unique Night of 10,000m PBs returns to showcase best of London athletics scene

As UK Athletics prepares to ditch the capital, in talks over bringing a (very) early end to its 50-year post-2012 Olympics legacy deal at the London Stadium, Londoners can at least take solace in the fact that the city’s best track meeting is back and going nowhere.

After two pandemic-forced postponements, the slightly clunkily named Night Of The 10,000m PBs returns to Parliament Hill, home of Highgate Harriers, on Saturday evening, with its usual promise of high-class international fields and uniquely raucous lane-three, ‘beer ‘n’ cheer’ atmosphere.

The event has, in the past, been dubbed the ‘Glastonbury of athletics’ for its social and celebratory, festival feel, but it is much more intimate than that, a grassroots endeavour which has blossomed out of a tight-knit north London running community and become one of the most popular and most lauded on the domestic calendar.

“Even the best guys, that’s why they run, I believe,” founder Ben Pochee tells Standard Sport. “You run because it’s part of your life and you want to socialise with other people who run but for some reason we tend to hide behind the fact that we all just want to be better runners. I tried to tap into that for the event really, trying to leverage it to be a social event.”

It was back in 2013 that Harriers member Pochee initially set out simply to provide the best British athletes with a regular chance to congregate and push one another to quick times, the majority of races over 10,000m in the UK tending to effectively turn into solo time trials because of a lack of depth.

“You had poor people like Andy Vernon, who at the time were like the next Mo [Farah], and the only way they could go out to get the qualifying times for the Olympics and the World