I think it would be London Athletic club. The following is from
https://www.playingpasts.co.uk/arti...the-conflict-between-the-north-and-the-south/ :
Athletics in London during the 1860s and 1870s was dominated by the rivalry of the London Athletic Club (LAC) and the Amateur Athletic Club (AAC).
[30] Whilst the AAC was responsible for introducing accurate timing and measurement, the club was also responsible for embedding elitism into amateur athletics.
[31] The beginnings of the amateur-professional dichotomy can be observed in the rules of the AAC and, more specifically, in the organisation’s definition of an amateur, which excluded anyone who had ever competed in open competition for financial gain, or had participated or assisted in athletics as a means of livelihood.
[32] Further restrictions included a membership clause that barred any mechanic, artisan or labourer from competing, regardless of their being complicit or not with respect to the club’s amateur rules.
[33]
In the columns of the
Athletic News, the timing of the AAC’s meetings were repeatedly remarked upon by the northern paper, paying particular emphasis to the point that northern athletes faced difficulty in competing, and the newspaper petitioned for the creation of a Northern Championship. The newspaper argued that whilst the LAC’s meetings were of better quality than the AAC’s, taking place during the summer at the height of the athletic season, without consideration for their northern contemporaries, their meets could not be deemed a competitive success. In the writer’s view, ‘London is not England, and the provinces ought to be as well represented as the capital’.
[34] These concerns over a lack of northern representation were justified with the championship virtually being contested only by athletes of metropolitan origin.
[35] Whilst the LAC wished to be more inclusive, holding their championship event at a more reasonable time in the season, the club failed to convert their metropolitan athletic dominance into national supremacy of the sport, making the creation of a northern championship, free from the problems associated with holding the event in London, a guaranteed conclusion.