The power of Community Sauna
Chapter 12 of Blowing Hot and Cold, my new sauna memoir
Blowing Hot and Cold is a slow memoir, told through weekly posts, about saunas, cold water, and how these things come together to boost my own mental health. It’s meant to be a year-long journey, but we’ll get up to Christmas and see what happens after that.
From midsummer nights in Finland to horsebox saunas on English beaches, from community gardens to embassy basements, each piece explores what happens when heat and cold strip life back to its essentials.
This is part twelve, a chat with Charlie Duckworth, director of the Community Sauna Baths in Hackney, which has pioneered the sauna movement in the UK
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“Culturally, we’re miles away from what they’re offering in Finland,” said Charlie, over a poor video call connection.
Charlie is Charlie Duckworth, a director of the Community Sauna Baths in Hackney Wick, which also runs the Bermondsey site. We were chatting on a wet morning at the end of the month, a few days after my time spent at the latter.
Charlie wasn’t being dismissive. Rather, he was pointing towards the fact that while a sauna culture did exist in the UK, it was nowhere near the level of cultural saturation and importance that it was in Finland and other parts of Scandinavia. He was pointing out the obvious, while doing the important job of steering me away from hyperbole.
With a well groomed moustache and short hair, Charlie appeared to embody the East London look. This, however, would be a deeply unfair characterisation, especially as what had begun as a post-lockdown project with friends had grown into a health and wellbeing service that had spawned six more non-profit outposts across the capital and four more around the country, including Bella’s Stanmer Sauna Garden.
“It was about spending that time to take care of yourself”
Charlie explained that he had always been into sauna. It was something he had done with his dad after playing sport, a way of decompressing and spending uninterrupted time with loved ones and strangers.
“It was like bonding time with my father, who was separated from my mum, so it had a little bit of a quality time element to it. I was always quite surprised other people didn’t like it as much, or it was a slightly odd thing to do.”
His fascination grew after moving to Bangkok, where he became a fan of the bath houses which proliferate throughout the city, much as onsen do in Japan.
“Each week it was about spending that time to take care of yourself. It was completely about the communal bathing as the activity. There was no sport, there was no spa, there was no gym or something like that attached to it.”
Having spent more time in the Lost Horizons sauna at Glastonbury and experiencing the social elements of hot and cold, he came back to London to see where he could find similar action, only to discover he couldn’t unless he broke the bank in order to do so.
“There just wasn’t really anywhere where you could afford to go regularly,” he says. “I was all about the hot and cold and the contrast and the feeling you get from that.”
Joining with a group of friends in the bleak months of the early 2021 Covid lockdown, Charlie began working on raising £250,000 of seed money, a figure which they didn’t achieve. However, a lifeline came in the form of the site at Hackney Wick, which has now become something of a ground zero in the UK sauna scene.
The fact it opened up in a world where people were craving human connection after the best part of two years spent indoors meant that the Community Sauna baths boomed. Today it is something of a must-visit for sauna fanatics.
“Hackney is probably more of a destination sauna, even though we do try and keep things local,” says Charlie. “Bermondsey though, people really fall in love with that in the local area. It’s not super accessible transport wise. So if you live in southeast London you can cycle there. There is a strong local element to it.”
Charlie became more animated when discussing the reasons for creating the Community Sauna model, which operates as a non profit, with staff deeply passionate about how sauna can change people’s lives for the better. This was as much about creating that culture which he said the UK was missing, as it was developing a business that could sustain itself. Certainly at Bermondsey there was a feeling that people were taking time to attend to their wellbeing, with so much of the chat while sitting on the benches and dipping into the plunges about how good it made them feel.
Social prescribing played a key role. This concept has gained traction in recent years and relates to the idea of GPs ‘prescribing’ natural remedies such as hikes in nature, swimming outdoors, gardening and, yes, sauna, as a way for those struggling with mental ill health to feel better. Bella was already plotting something similar in Brighton, while in Shetland doctors have been prescribing guided walks since 2018. In 2023, health professionals in Derbyshire began offering the RSPB’s nature prescriptions, with patients offered guided walks in the Peak District alongside mental health specialists. The aim isn’t to replace other methods of dealing with such issues. Rather, it’s to complement them.
“We’ve done a lot of work, putting a lot of time and money into developing our social prescription offering,” said Charlie. “We’ve got a full time employee who works with the NHS and community communities and charities in the area.”
Charlie went on to explain that patients suffering with anxiety, depression, loneliness and isolation are prescribed 10 free sauna sessions via the NHS. On the face of it, this is hugely impressive, but convincing local people who might see sauna as an inherently middle class pastime, rather than a day to day experience that has tangible benefits, as it is seen in Finland and other countries around the Baltics, is more of a challenge.
“We’re still a long way away from people feeling that’s a normal thing,” he added. “The people being prescribed this stuff are not people who would think of sauna [in the first place] or think that it is good for them.”
Convincing those who have been prescribed sauna takes time, said Charlie.
“Polly [who works full time on Hackney’s social prescribing programme], brings people on board with one on one sessions and phone calls, before they are brought into the space
“I think making people feel comfortable is essential and creating a safe space for them is key,” says Charlie. “We’ve found that bringing people in for events can reduce any awkwardness. If there’s something else to focus on, like storytelling or some sort of musical element, that can kind of ease people in a bit more. One of the problems might just be feeling awkward sitting in a very hot space thinking, ‘What the hell am I even doing?’”
What was striking about Charlie was how up for the challenge he seemed. These were not things to be surmounted, rather ways to prove to more and more people that alternating between hot and cold could powerfully reset the nervous system and have long lasting benefits in conjunction with other treatments.
We left each other with a promise to stay in touch and a plan for me to visit and meet Polly so I could learn more about her work and how Community Sauna was hoping to change the world. I liked their optimism and hope in a time when such emotions are in short supply. In the meantime, as my anxiety had one of its occasional upswings, Bella had got in touch with a plan that I could not resist going along with.