The Bath House banya: Contrast therapy in Belgravia
Contrast therapy is big business. Steve Dinneen visits The Bath House banya in Belgravia for a traditional sauna and icy plunge
It is hard to overstate the meteoric rise in the UK’s hot and cold therapy business. The number of Finnish-style public saunas has grown from around 45 in 2023 to more than 700 today, with 100 opening in 2026 alone. These range from beach-side wooden boxes to sprawling complexes offering treatment menus and food offerings that wouldn’t be out of place in a restaurant.
Around the corner from where I live in Blackhorse Road – the formerly rough bit of Walthamstow that’s now home to around a dozen breweries – a Community Sauna has opened (beside a brandy distillery, naturally) with four different saunas, plunge pools at a variety of temperatures and daily events ranging from aromatherapy to group sing-alongs.
In perhaps the maddest statistic of all, the UK could overtake Germany and Finland to become Europe’s biggest sauna market as soon as 2033. It’s a remarkable turnaround for a nation traditionally suspicious of extremes of… well, anything at all, really.
The reasons are myriad: the growth of the wellness sector as a whole, the post-Covid spike in the experience economy, the well-publicised health benefits of contrast therapy (getting hot and then getting cold again, basically), the desire to find activities that don’t involve the pub…
This is among the few trends I can safely say I was part of before it was cool. I became a regular of an east London banya more than a decade ago and over the years I’ve visited saunas across Europe, even learning to perform the parenie treatment where you manipulate hot air with leaves (usually birch but sometimes oak) to intensify the experience.
Inside The bath House in Belgravia
So I was delighted to try The Bath House in Belgravia, a traditional Russian banya located within a traditional West London townhouse. Having opened in 2019, a huge amount of thought has gone into the design, from the authentic tiles – including an extravagantly detailed oven in the main sauna – to the murals and traditional paintings that transport you from bouji West London to the Central European countryside. The overall effect is of a place that’s been here for decades rather than years.
The concept is simple: you book a table for three hours and it’s yours for the duration. In that time you can take as many trips to the sauna and plunge pool as you like. The basic package includes the aforementioned parenie and another treatment from the menu.
After a few trips to the sauna – followed by the icy bucket and a dip in the cold plunge (and this cold plunge is cold) – you’re called in for your parenie. As you lie prone, a burly Slavic-looking man stands over you wielding two handfuls of birch twigs, rustling his leaves in the hottest part of the sauna and coaxing the hot air towards your skin. As the intensity builds, the pressure increases to a not insubstantial, rhythmic thwack, thwack, thwack, never quite painful but certainly a cousin of pain. After half an hour or so, it’s into the plunge pool with you, where you emerge tingling from head to toe, euphoric to the point of mania. You can see why so many people swear by the health benefits. The giddy glow lasts long after you have left the banya.
For my second treatment at The Bath House, I went for a full body tar scrub, involving a vigorous rub down with exfoliating gloves, which I was expecting, and a mad lather which I definitely wasn’t. By extruding soap through some kind of linen sack, the therapist creates a giant cocoon of suds that envelopes you like a warm cloud. This lather is thick enough that they can massage you through it, giving the sensation of being gently smooshed by something that’s neither air nor liquid but some fuzzy state in between. I’ve never felt anything quite like it.
After all of that, there’s the food: awaiting me was a platter of salo (cured pig fat) with onions, herring and potato, beef tongue, and palmeni (traditional meat dumplings). This simple, rustic food hits differently when you’re in a post parenie high; an ice cold pint of Rothhaus beer doesn’t hurt, either. It’s a fantastic experience, whether you’re new to banyas or a seasoned master of heat and cold. I expect I will return often.
• For more information and to book visit the website here or visit at 1 Grosvenor Gardens, SW1W 0BD