A Hucknall based bowls club held an open day for people to try their hand at the sport on Bank Holiday Monday.

Titchfield Park Bowls Club on Park Drive, which was established in 1935, hosted the event to encourage more people to take up the sport. It formed part of Bowls England's national campaign called Bowls Big Weekend, an initiative that affiliated clubs across the country signed up to in order to help boost the sport's popularity.

Committee Member Peter Dickens, who has been a member of the club for nine years, said: "Every year this club does open days and taster sessions and people that come, if they enjoy what they've done they will then come back to us. Then I take them through a bit of coaching to try and improve their technique, and learn about the sport, learn about the game, learn about how matches operate, who does what and what happens in a match.

"So over a two or three month period people go from absolute novices like today up to a point where they can actually come to the green and have a go. And that's what this is all about, this is an open day which is essentially a recruitment day giving new people an opportunity to learn a new sport."

One of Dickens' concerns is the lack of younger people playing Bowls.

"It's always been a very popular sport but in the last 20 years the number of people nationally taking part in the sport has decreased simply because there are so many other opportunities for people to do things, particularly youngsters, and there are very few youngsters coming into the sport now.

"We were hoping we would attract some youngsters into the sport, we've had one or two young ones here, we don't know whether they'll be attracted to it or not, there's so much to attract them.

"Traditionally the sport's always been linked with the retired folk but actually that's not really true because, all of the international players are relatively young, they're in their 20s and 30s, some are in their 40s. The international teams in England, Wales, Scotland they're all relatively young people."

Dickens also stressed the social benefits of playing Bowls.

"It's a very friendly club to be involved with. We're one of the very few clubs who routinely have things called roll ups. It's social bowling. It's where all the members come together on a Tuesday afternoon, on a Friday afternoon and a Sunday afternoon, here on the green. And however many members turn up, we subdivide into rinks and have a nice social game of bowls for a couple of hours."

Anyone still interested in joining the club, who may have missed the open day, can do so by contacting the club via their website which can be found here .