About Us

City Challenge works with a wide cross-section of businesses, from large blue chip organisations to specialist suppliers and SMEs. The flexibility of our offering means events can be tailored to meet different budgets and different sized groups - from as small as a team of 8 to as large as 350 - and our range of Challenges has been specially designed to help clients tackle a variety of issues within the workplace.

Our client list includes businesses and institutions from sectors such as finance, legal, retail, education, IT, government, pharmaceutical, petroleum and telecoms, with just some of the top names listed below:

BAE Systems Dyson BP National Grid ConocoPhilips British Energy Marks and Spencer Transport for London Kraft Foods UK Delegation to NATO Airbus

Eurostar Nationwide Orange Royal Bank of Scotland Yorkshire Building Society Sanofi-Pasteur MSD Environment Agency E.On TNT Roche Products Debenhams

Click here to find out how we helped these teams operate more effectively.

Company background

Jane Read, managing director of City Challenge, is passionate about history and loves nothing more than inspiring people to appreciate the rich heritage of the cities where her challenges are based.

She founded the company in 1998 after seeing first-hand some of the teambuilding events available. She realised there was a gap in the marketplace for an organisation which delivered tangible workplace benefits, while still enabling staff to have an enjoyable day out of the office.

Combining her experience in the corporate and event management world with her team development skills, Jane has built City Challenge into a successful and thriving business which delivers training programmes to some of the UK's best known names in the corporate world.

The company today

City Challenge is based at Culham Innovation Centre near Abingdon, in Oxfordshire, where it has a core team of staff and specialist personnel.

The company keeps its business deliberately "niche" or if you prefer, "lean and mean", and this means having a team of trained learning and development and motivation experts available to provide support to our clients as and when required. This enables us to match the requirements of our clients and their teams with the particular skills of our different experts. All our facilitation team members are personally recommended by fellow current team members and go through a special City Challenge induction programme.