Sauna culture is heating up London’s nightlife

It’s 7pm on a freezing winter evening and I’m sipping an effervescent red cocktail in a Canary Wharf basement. The city’s finance bro capital might sound like an unusual location for a party, and even more so: a party with pounding house music, where everyone is nearly naked, ridiculously toned and glinting with sweat. But this is no ordinary night out. It’s the opening of ARC, the UK’s first contrast therapy club (offering a mixture of extreme hot and cold treatments), home to the nation’s largest sauna, with a 65-person capacity.

Alongside the mega sauna, ARC consists of a dimly-lit room with ice baths and a sleek coliseum-shaped lounge, decked out with a custom 300-watt sound system which makes your whole body vibrate. Here, guests can take breaks between the intense sauna sessions, listening to DJ sets while drinking (unlimited) cups of loose-leaf tea. ‘There’s something about going through this experience that really drops all your inhibitions’, says ex-Soho House director, Chris Miller, who, like many others here, is topless. ‘This is what bars and clubs used to be, before everyone was on dating apps’.

Spending your Friday night sweating next to a bunch of investment bankers might well sound like some people’s idea of hell. But Miller, who co-founded ARC with neuroscientist and holistic health expert, Alanna Kit, is not the only one on the hot-and-cold hype – he’s adding to the rapidly growing list of public saunas that have popped up across the UK since the pandemic. Many of these venues are reinventing the traditional sauna model, throwing parties, listening sessions and immersive events that provide an alternative nightlife space beyond pubs, clubs and bars. 

The idea for ARC can be traced back to around four years ago, when Miller was (wrongly) diagnosed with Crohn’s disease and (mostly) gave up drinking. Eliminating alcohol from his life left him mulling over an existential question: ‘How do I, having been in the nightlife and hospitality industry for 15 years, want to spend my evenings?’ Then, in the summer of 2023, he spent an evening contrast bathing at Remedy Place and Bathhouse, a wellness club in Manhattan, and had an epiphany. 

The dopamine spike after a two-minute ice bath is similar to that of a line of cocaine

When you’re getting drunk, ‘you’re borrowing happiness from tomorrow’, he realised. Saunas and cold plunges, on the other hand, actually improve your mental health the following day. Not only does the intense heat and sharp coldness force you to be present, but the combo actually impacts the neurobiology of our brains. 

‘The dopamine spike [after a two-minute ice bath] is similar to that of a line of cocaine’, says Miller, adding that the mood-boosting effects ‘will last for two days and increase your baseline [dopamine level]’. Paired with partial nudity, saunas have the ‘girls bathroom in a nightclub effect’ of melting away social barriers, creating a warmer, more laid-back atmosphere. 

I take a sip of my negroni, which is actually No-Groni – a raspberry and grapefruit concoction made from Italian botanicals provided by Lina Stores (ARC is currently trialling a range of non-alcoholic beverages to become a permanent part of ARC’s menu; currently just tea and kombucha is available). With more than 40 percent of 18 to 34-year-olds in the UK sober, saunas are becoming popular third spaces for those who have ditched drinking but still crave that bodily high and transcendence from daily life.

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‘People are looking for places to meet up to hang out that are centered around well-being and not just around alcohol, which traditionally, in the UK, is where we socialize,’ says Nikki Tesla, DJ and co-founder of Social Sauna Club, which launched in August. Nestled down an unassuming alleyway in Peckham, Social Sauna Club has built something of a psychedelic sanctuary: a tall, arched room comprised of a sauna, bar and cosy lounge allotted with Japanese-style low tables, cushions and blankets and lit up with multicoloured light projections.

While the venue does serve alcohol, such as craft beers and tinned cocktails, it also has a comprehensive list of teas and non-alcoholic cocktails including palomas, negronis and spritzes. On Friday and Saturday evenings, the club hosts ambient listening sessions, sometimes with alternative audiovisual elements, like a harp performance and live visual artwork. The vibes are lowkey and downtempo; guests read their books on the sofas or meditate while listening to the ethereal beats.

Saunas have been a part of Scandinavian culture for thousands of years, providing warmth and solace during long, cold and dark winters, but in recent years, the practice has become increasingly popular around the world. In New York City, a number of party collectives have begun throwing sauna parties, like Angel Touch Spa, DAYBREAKER, and Steamroom, which throws debaucherous techno raves in a Russian banya in Brooklyn. 

‘I think the London [sauna] scene is going to get very, very interesting’, said ex-Radio One DJ Rob da Bank, who launched the sauna company SLOMO. ‘It’s a bit like when drum and bass and jungle came out. No one knew which direction it was going to go in’.

You’ll start seeing more saunas in pubs and nightclubs

Saunas, he predicts will ‘go off in every tangent’: there will be hippy saunas and ‘pounding techno’ saunas as well as ‘multi million pound, very swanky’ saunas. Later this month, Community Sauna Baths, which has venues in Hackney Wick, Stratford, Peckham and Bermondsey, is throwing its third sauna music festival, Saunaverse, while a number of venues host regular nighttime events. ARC runs ‘ARC After Dark’ sessions on Thursdays and Fridays, and in May, The Sanctuary is opening up in Shoreditch, hosting ‘immersive’ sauna experiences, music events and speed dating.

Rob reckons that London’s emerging sauna scene coincides with the revival of ambient parties, catering to those who want an ‘escape route’ from the world’s noise. ‘Maybe you’ll start seeing more saunas in pubs or more saunas in nightclubs,’ Rob says. ‘Nightclubs and pubs and saunas are becoming one thing in a way.’

Cooling off

A couple of weeks after ARC’s opening night, I headed to Community Sauna Baths’ Hackney Wick venue, for Saunasthesia, a ‘multi-sensory experience’ hosted in a hifi-equipped black-out sauna. The hour and a half event incorporates four 15 minute sauna sessions with breaks for cinnamon and rose tea and the option to shower or jump into the cold plunge. DJ William Dougherty had put together a mix, which he sent to Omar R, a ‘Master’ in Aufguss – a ritual that involves rhythmically waving a towel and wafting the heat around a sauna – who curated a series of overlapping scents to match the music.

Just after sunset, I clambered into the pitch-black sauna with a group of strangers and closed my eyes. The next hour and a half felt like sleepwalking through Fantasia. The recorded set metamorphosised from pointillistic jazz to spacey ambient to UK bass, while scents shapeshifted from lemon to peppermint to mandarin to rosemary. At times the heat felt too much to bear, but just as I approached my limit, we cooled off outside with a group plunge in a six-degree barrel of ice-cold water. By the final burst, my entire body was tingling. 

‘I’m still recallibrating to reality,’ I told Dougherty, when we caught up by a firepit after the sauna session. He laughed that he’s heard this before: people often tell him that Saunasthesia reminds them of drug-induced psychedelic experiences. The sauna is ‘much more immersive [than a nightclub]; I think people go much deeper,’ he says. ‘It just turns up the volume on everything you feel… there’s few spaces dedicated to that experience, especially in a way that’s as immediate’.

Perhaps it’s no surprise that in the midst of a loneliness epidemic, as many Brits crave connection beyond the atomizing and often superficial worlds of our phones, that saunas have boomed in popularity, providing a space for togetherness, community, escape. The Scandi custom has the paradoxical effect of bringing us together – making us feel less lonely – while also pulling us inwards, pushing us to confront new avenues of our minds. ‘Part of it is to get you to a place where you’re so uncomfortable that you have no choice but to just let go, and that’s really where magic happens,’ says Dougherty, ‘I think it becomes like training for life’.

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