The gloves are on - London's boxing boom

'There are some cowboys out there,' he says. 'They put on shows under the white-collar boxing banner but none of their boxers are from what you would call white-collar professions. They also pay scant attention to boxers' safety.' In contrast, he says, TRFC insists on vetting fighters, putting them on intense training regimes and ensuring they are evenly matched. It has a doctor, an anaesthetist and paramedics present at every event.

Doctors are also ringside at the newest kid on the London boxing block: chess boxing. Tim Woolgar, founder of the Islington-based London ChessBoxing Club, admits he hopes those drawn to white-collar boxing will also try what he's offering: matches which begin with a four-minute chess round, followed by three minutes of boxing, and so on. 'It's more rewarding,' he says, 'because we engage in two activities which are remarkably similar.'

To date, London has hosted four chess boxing events; the fifth is shortly to occur at The Boston Arms in Tufnell Park on 26 March. Chess boxing, in which combatants win by KO or checkmate, draws crowds of up to 500 and is proving popular with what Woolgar describes as 'an open-minded crowd of City and arty types'. Its appeal, he says, is that 'chess boxing teaches participants to think strategically under pressure.' He adds that 'if the City's bankers had learnt chess boxing, we might not have had a recession.'

London has always had a rich boxing tradition. The Lamb & Flag in Covent Garden may now be a popular watering hole but in the 17th- century it hosted bare-knuckle fights. Hence the moniker of one its rooms 'the Bucket of Blood'. Pubs were associated with boxing, the Thomas A Becket on Old Kent Road, The Ring in Blackfriars and the Tom Cribb in Panton Street all becoming synonymous with pugilism. The city also spawned a number of champions: Terry Downes, Henry Cooper and Nigel Benn, to name but a few.

And in the East End especially, boxing took root. Amateur clubs such as Repton and West Ham are still going strong, and in Bethnal Green, York Hall hosted so many classic fights that it became British boxing's spiritual home.

Boxing's virtues played a major role in the success of East End boy made (very) good, Andreas Panayiotou. Panayiotou made 158th place on the Sunday Times Rich List 2010, and his latest project sees the opening of the new hotel Waldorf Astoria in Syon Park. Dressed in an immaculate dark-blue suit and armed with a copy of the FT, Panayiotou is every inch the embodiment of its notion of 'playful luxury'. The man who amassed a £500 million fortune through property development makes for a persuasive advocate of the noble art.

'I learnt to box with Bobby Ramsey, a famous boxer who lived next door to me on Mile End Road,' says Panayiotou, who boxed as an amateur at middleweight, winning 52 out of 53 fights. Boxing manager Terry Lawless wanted Panayiotou, who was the Essex and Eastern Counties Amateur Boxing Association ABA champion, to turn pro, but he decided in favour of business instead.

'Boxing has played a massive role in my success,' says Panayiotou. 'It kept me out of trouble as a teenager and gave me inner strength. Everything I've learnt comes from boxing: balance, focus and discipline. Self-reliance too: in the ring, you can't rely on anyone but yourself. I'm never over-confident before a business meeting, just as, before a fight, you can never be cocky. Boxing has taught me that it's not how many times you fall, but how many you rise that's important.' For Panayiotou, who has a collage of photographs of Muhammad Ali, his favourite fighter, in one of the Syon Park hotel's lounges, 'boxing is an art'.

Ali was boxing's beautiful poster boy in the 1960s, and now New York is witnessing the advent of something perhaps even more curious than chess boxing. Step forward Friday Night Throwdown, whose organisers pit male models, perhaps keen to lose their pretty boy tag lines, against real boxers and street fighters. Only one model, 20-year-old 'Rockstar' Charlie, has ever won a bout, but crowds of 700 have started turning up for what is thus far an underground scene in warehouses in Brooklyn and Chinatown. Models who have starred in campaigns for D&G, Marc Jacobs and Hugo Boss have exchanged punches, so could this, like white-collar boxing, be the next boxing trend to cross the Atlantic?

If it does, Dudley O'Shaughnessy, 20, would be well placed to compete. He grew up boxing at West Ham Amateur Boxing Club and is last year's national ABA champion at welterweight, but recently hung up his gloves in favour of a modelling career. 'My dad was a pro boxing trainer and when I was a kid I used to play with his boxing trophies,' says O'Shaughnessy. 'As soon as I was old enough to start training, I did. I love it. I still train and go to the gym now. It's part of my life; it's home to me.'

Rob Evans, who hails from Banbury, is treading the same path as O'Shaughnessy. The 22-year-old was training in his local amateur boxing gym one day when he was introduced to AMCK Models' Simon Worgan. Evans soon came to the attention of fashion photographer Bruce Weber, and is now working for Givenchy. 'I can't explain how I feel about it all because it still feels unreal,' he says. 'I didn't ask for modelling, it just happened. Six weeks later I'm named model of the year. It's crazy.'

Evans' boxer's physique certainly eased his metamorphosis from construction worker to model. The fashion world's embrace of boxing doesn't stop with these two: D&G recently dressed the entire Milano Thunder Italian boxing team including Olympic medallist Clemente Russo.

My own experience of boxing wasn't one of high fashion. But having gone off the rails in my early 30s, thanks to too much drinking, I immersed myself in boxing. I trained hard with TRFC's coaches, and also at Walcot ABC in Swindon. I turned a wayward life around, but spent so much time boxing that to have a fight now would be all but suicidal: I have a titanium cage instead of a disc in my cervical spine. But I wouldn't change a thing. For as the legendary exhortation of 'Gentleman' Jim Corbett has it: 'Fight one more round, when your arms are so tired that you can hardly lift your hands to come on guard, fight one more round, when your nose is bleeding and your eyes are black and you are so tired that you wish your opponent would crack you one on the jaw and put you to sleep, fight one more round - remembering that the man who always fights one more round is never whipped.'
Alex Wade is the author of Wrecking Machine: A Tale of Real Fights and White Collars (Simon & Schuster, £7.99). Visit therealfightclub.co.uk and londonchessboxing.com for more info