Article: The Best Spa. The Best Gym and The Best Club in the UK
The Best Spa. The Best Gym and The Best Club in the UK
Wellness is a dominant global megatrend of our age. In monetary terms that translates into a market worth £5 trillion in 2024 according to The Global Wellness Institute.
What is wellness? A catch-all term that spans six broad dimensions; health, sleep, nutrition, fitness, appearance and mindfulness.
Wellness is shaping where we want to live, where we want to work, what experiences we prioritise, where we travel and what we consume. Wellness is no longer a feature. It’s becoming the operating system that modern luxury brands are built on.
THE BEST SPA
At the forefront of modern luxury you have the 6-Senses, re-imagining new standards. Their latest hotel opening (March 2nd) will be in the historical Whitely's building, where "human-centred design" as General Manager Nick Yarnell calls it, is all pervasive, including "a whole floor dedicated to wellness", i.e. a 25,000 square foot underground Spa, holding space for both movement and stillness. In spite of being underground the most striking observation for me was the feeling of space, punctuated by double, if not triple-heighted ceilings. They also offer our fine British menswear here.
The very best feature of this James Bond-esque lair is London's first magnesium pool (for skin hydration and muscle relaxation!), using the minimum legal amount of chlorine and multiple filtration levels. There’s a thermal suite with a magnesium bath, steam room, Finnish sauna and cold plunge.
The Spa itself "blends innovation with ritual, combining pioneering recovery methods with ancient healing practices brought to life through the Alchemy Bar, and longevity medical clinic" according to the press release. “We try to attract people who are looking for a wellness-driven experience, who live the lifestyle,” says wellness director Taffryn Kinsey Ellis. Red-light therapy, an infrared sauna and a cryotherapy ice pod reaching -110°C all have their place in the spa, alongside a meticulously-finished mosaic hammam and a room with a flotation pod for resting your senses. “Essentially a meditation pod where you’re floating,” Kinsey Ellis explains.
THE BEST GYM
As you walk on to the gym floor you get a sense of how expansive the place is. There are no less than x7 clearly defined areas, including a very large free weights and power lifting zone, a separate room dedicated to weight machines, a yoga studio, a private PT salon, a mirrored and dimly lit room tucked away and used mainly for core exercises, then a vast open-planned room with oodles of floor space, metal rigs for TRX bars, boxing bags and calisthenics, a zone for all of the cardio machines you can think of and finally an area with a prowler track, where you can also tuck yourself away in busy periods for stretching and mobility. It really is big.
If gyms are your habitat, you can't fail to be impressed nor excited by what's here. My advice is to arrive with a plan, but an open mind - the possibilities are endless. Maybe push your next meeting back by 10mins, so you can try something new!
And one other thing - you are not allowed to use your mobile phone in here. This is not a rule exclusive to White City House gym per se, but holding people to account during busy periods really helps. The sonic dissonance of overhearing one side of a conversation while you're gasping for air or fighting to keep your form during final reps, is strangely infuriating. The aural equivalent of personal space is 'acoustic territory' and in our modern lives it is a luxury when we can ringfence this from others.
THE BEST CLUB
The Club by Bamford is an exceptional place. It is a private members club set within 3,500 acres of organic farmland in the Cotswolds and founded with the belief that we need to live in harmony with nature and to respect the land that provides for us. It is beautiful and wonderfully looked after, with so much recreational space to enjoy in as well as outdoors.
The founder, Carole Bamford, designed The Club to immerse its members in nature - a place where you can have a swim looking out onto the orchard, take your fitness outside with your trainer or enjoy some nourishing food on the terrace overlooking where the ingredients were grown. In the 'era of exhaustion' and constant connectivity, one of the biggest trends in wellness is emotional regulation. In the absence of traffic, in the presence of natural beauty The Club is a secluded sanctuary for restoration and recreation.
"We enhance that calm with the most advanced facilities from ice barrels to our infrared sauna, indoor cold plunge pool, and PBM" ...photo-biomodulation don't you know! This last one stimulates cells via red and clear light frequency to reduce inflammation, whilst working on your nervous system. "It's meant to be great for your skin, increasing collagen production, and also creates a deep state of relaxation." Says Andy Walters, Head of Fitness at The Club.
The Club offers a 360-degree approach to wellness with two primary offerings - the holistic and therapeutic sessions in the spa alongside the physically active and dynamic sessions in the gym. The spa is equipped with three studios all offering something different. There is a pilates studio, a large yoga studio and a smaller studio for sound-therapy. They run over 100 classes across all studios - "we want to offer the very best place for recovery and for physical adaptations through training. We have amazing in-house expertise from an array of physical practitioners, and we also bring in freelance experts to ensure our members have access to a rich diversity of physical disciplines." Says Andy.
It feels as if anything is possible at The Club. They even have a carefully curated retail offering, which includes our fine British sportswear.
Leave a comment
This site is protected by hCaptcha and the hCaptcha Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply.