London has no shortage of boutique fitness offerings, with more and more luxury gyms opening across the capital every year. But now that the fitness sector has finally reopened after the latest lockdown, which are the best ones to put your name down for? Whether you’re looking for top-of-the-range personal training, a holistic wellness experience, gruelling exercise classes or world-class medical fitness, there’s something for everyone – here’s our edit of the very best gyms in London.
Lanserhof at The Arts Club
This revolutionary offering at the Arts Club on Dover Street, dubbed “the world’s first medical gym”, gives you access to some of the country’s finest medical professionals as your fitness coaches. The airy space is spread across six floors and comes with a high-tech induction process that includes a ride in an aerospace-inspired machine that assesses your body composition, posture, gait and musculoskeletal system, the results of which form the basis of your bespoke training and treatment programme.
As for their cutting-edge Technogym, it features smart machines that recognise guests and automatically sync to their individual personal training programmes, and there are also over 250 exercise classes on offer each month, including Pilates, yoga and spin.
Annual membership starts from £4,000 or £334 monthly, while pay-as-you-go personal training sessions start from £110 for 55 minutes
17-18 Dover Street, Mayfair, London, W1S 4LT
lanserhof.com
Third Space
One of the smartest boutique gym offerings in the city, Third Space has seven outposts across the capital, including Soho, Marylebone and Canary Wharf, with a Moorgate site in the pipeline for winter 2022. Their sleekly designed spaces come with state-of-the-art equipment, ranging from infinity-level 20m swimming pools with ultra-violet filtration technology to keep the water permanently purified to custom-built sprint tracks, athletic rigs and climbing walls.
Third Space also runs a packed timetable of weekly classes, ranging from weight training, spin and cardio to barre and yoga, and their newest gym in Mayfair comes with a sleek Eleiko strength training area, a performance watt bike zone and a Himalayan sea-salt walled sauna.
Monthly membership starts from £165
Branches in Mayfair, Marylebone, Islington, Canary Wharf, Soho, Tower Bridge and the City
thirdspace.london
The Body Lab
This high-tech new gym on High Street Kensington bills itself as the place “where science meets wellness”, and the whizzy equipment on offer certainly lives up to that promise. Alongside state-of-the-art machines from the likes of Technogym and Keiser, there are several facilities that have never been seen in the UK before, like the Hyperbaric Hydroxy AirPod, which speeds up the body’s healing process, and the coldest whole body Cryotherapy Dual Chamber in Europe, set at a bone-chilling -110 degrees Celsius.
The focus here is on creating a holistic journey that will leave you feeling in peak condition – while the workouts are gruelling, there’s a lot of emphasis on optimising recovery to help reduce inflammation and stress, with an infrared sauna and the UK’s largest float tank on hand for post-workout relaxation. They’ve even thought about the lighting, which is cool during the day and warm in the mornings and evenings to mimic the body’s circadian rhythm.
Membership packages start from £5,000 per annum.
151-153 Kensington High Street, Kensington, London, W8 6SU
thebodylablondon.com
Eight Core
Part of one of London’s newest members’ club offerings, Eight Club, Eight Core offers one of the most luxurious workout spaces in the capital. Members at their Moorgate site work with a personal trainer to create a bespoke fitness schedule, whether that’s improving your strength and conditioning through Crossfit or working on your core stability. There’s also a diverse range of classes on offer, from HIIT sessions and Pilates to Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu and Thai boxing sparring.
Membership gives you access to their bespoke nutrition app, where you can put together weekly meal plans to maximise results, as well as a sports medicine clinic run by Dr Kal Parmar, a leading Sports and Exercise Medicine physician, who’ll assess any aches and pains and figure out the best treatment options.
Premium membership costs £1,750 per annum
1 Dysart Street, Moorgate, London, EC2A 2BX
eightclub.co.uk
Vita
Chelsea welcomed a new high-end fitness destination at the beginning of the year in the form of Vita, a six-story studio overlooking Sloane Square. The beautifully designed space, which features natural materials and warm colours inspired by the founder’s Mediterranean roots (‘vita’ means ‘life’ in Italian), the gym is home to dedicated personal training studios as well as three floors that house Reformer Pilates, yoga and barre studios.
Rounding out their 360 approach to wellness you’ll also find treatment rooms dedicated to physiotherapy, osteopathy, sport massage and nutrition, Face Yoga sessions with their expert facialist, Nicole Campbell-Watson, and a café serving up healthy options in partnership with Kiss the Hippo, London’s first carbon neutral coffee company.
Unlimited packages start from £298 per month
31 Sloane Square, Chelsea, London, SW1W 8AQ
vitaboutiquefitness.com
BXR
Known as London’s finest boxing gym – which is no surprise, considering it’s co-owned by double heavyweight champion Anthony Joshua, who trains here – BXR is nothing like the spit-and-sawdust boxing rings you might have visited before.
The original site is housed in a 12,000 sq ft industrial chic space in Marylebone, with impressive concrete pillars and murals of boxing legends on the walls, while downstairs you’ll find Sweat by BXR, their pay-as-you-go fitness class offering that includes strength and conditioning and yoga sessions, as well as Europe’s only Versa Climber class. Further sites have followed, including a studio in Canary Wharf and their newly-launched space in the City, which is London’s highest gym and offers staggering views over the capital’s skyline.
Annual memberships start from £1,375 or £125 per month, and they also offer a range of flexible class packs starting from £30 per class
Branches in Marylebone, Canary Wharf and the City
bxrlondon.com
The Lanesborough Club & Spa
This exclusive private members’ fitness and health club, located within Belgravia’s five-star Lanesborough Hotel, boasts one of the most luxurious gyms in the capital, spread across 18,000 sq ft of gleaming marble, elegant interior design and opulent gilded changing rooms.
The club offers a 360-degree approach to wellbeing, with tailored fitness programmes on state-of-the-art machines and a roster of challenging exercise classes balanced out with spa treatments carried out by some of London’s leading therapists and dips in their relaxing hydro-pool.
Joining fee range between £1,000 – £2,000; Monthly between £300 – £525; Annual between £3,500 – £6,000
2 Lanesborough Place, Belgravia, London, SW1X 7TA
lanesboroughclubandspa.com
KX
This ultra-smart gym (which is pronounced ‘kicks’) has been a Chelsea institution since opening in 2002 and has trained everyone from Pippa Middleton to Gwyneth Paltrow – rumour has it this is even where Prince Harry got into shape for his wedding. Alongside their top-of-the-range gym there’s a swimming pool and spa, as well as specially designed fitness studios for martial arts, spinning and yoga.
All members also undergo a detailed health analysis upon joining, measuring everything from your body composition to your DNA make-up, and there are in-house clinics where you can book in for physiotherapy sessions and aesthetic medical treatments. Membership also includes monthly assessments to help you check and support your wellness and fitness goals.
Monthly memberships start from £595
151 Draycott Avenue, Chelsea, London, SW3 3AL
kxlife.co.uk
Equinox
This brand of gyms has a long-time cult following across the pond, where it originated, and has been just as successful since launching over here with their first outpost on High Street Kensington in 2012. Since then two more clubs have followed, in St James’s and Bishopsgate, and there are plans for a Shoreditch offering soon.
Their spaces are some of the most beautifully designed in London, with their light-filled Kensington gym housed beneath a domed skylight and their St James’s spot featuring grand marble pillars and corniced ceilings. Alongside their well-equipped gyms, which come with fridges filled with eucalyptus-scented towels, members also have access to cryotherapy chambers and a compression therapy area to speed up recovery and improve athletic performance.
Monthly memberships start from £215
Branches in Kensington, St James’s and the City
equinox.com
Workshop Gymnasium
Tucked away underneath the smart Bulgari hotel in Knightsbridge sits Workshop, one of the city’s best-kept fitness secrets. Founded by personal trainer Lee Mullins, who’s responsible for the chiselled bodies of Adriana Lima and Amy Jackson, this is the first port of call for the fashion elite, who love it for its chicly minimal design and expert trainers – plus the fact that you’ll find them in Bulgari hotels around the world, from Dubai and Milan to Bali and Beijing.
Their specifically tailored, one-to-one training sessions incorporate a mix of Pilates, boxing, water barre and yoga techniques and nutrition is a key part of their programme, which is why they launched their own line of all-natural supplements in 2017.
Annual memberships start from £3,500 and pay-as-you-train sessions are available from £150
171 Knightsbridge, Knightsbridge, London, SW7 1DW
workshopgymnasium.com
Bodyism
Founded by celebrity trainer James Duigan, whose clients have included Rosie Huntington-Whiteley, Elle Macpherson and Emilia Clarke, Bodyism is known as one of the world’s leading holistic wellness companies.
Its flagship space on Westbourne Grove in Notting Hill attracts well-heeled locals and visiting elite alike (the gym also has outposts in the UAE and the Maldives), who come for their expert PT sessions and exercise classes, which include boxing, barre, dance cardio and their signature sessions, a dynamic fusion of interval training, Pilates, yoga, meditation and stretching.
There are several membership tiers, the most exclusive of which is the Platinum membership, that starts with a Body Oracle assessment to evaluate physical strength, injuries, sleep patterns and lifestyle, before a bespoke ‘blueprint’ is created for future training.
Annual memberships start from £1,500 or £130 per month, while their Platinum membership is £30,000 per annum
222-224 Westbourne Grove, Notting Hill, London, W11 2RH
bodyism.com
1Rebel
This boutique gym brand, which has nine outposts in London including in Angel, Oxford Circus and the City, is known for hosting some of the toughest exercise classes in the capital. Their gruelling sessions include Rumble, a 45-minute boxing battle filled with punching combos and bodyweight drills, Ride, their take on a high-octane spin class with revolutionary lighting and sound systems (more like a night-club session than a workout class) and Reshape, their full-body workout that mixes quick fire rounds of high-powered treadmill sessions with dynamic weight sequences.
Their newest offerings are Reformer, which is their take on Reformer Pilates complete with darkened rooms and state-of-the-art Reformer beds, and Rig, a custom-created HIIT programme that has you moving through four zones: bike, row, bench and rig.
Unlimited passes cost £179 per month
Branches in Mayfair, Hammersmith, Holborn, Angel, Victoria, South Bank, Bayswater, Broadgate and Liverpool Street
1rebel.com
