National Geographic put a Hackney sauna on a list with forest bathing in Japan. I had to see it for myself, mostly out of pure disbelief.
National Geographic has ranked sitting in a wooden box on a Hackney rooftop, sweating gently while looking at the London skyline, as one of the twenty most exciting travel adventures on the planet for this year, placing it seventh on a list that also features forest bathing in Japan and a football pilgrimage across South America. I read this three times to make sure I wasn’t misunderstanding it. I was not misunderstanding it. So, obviously, I had to go and sit in the sauna myself, purely in the name of journalistic diligence.
Community saunas have properly exploded across this city in the past couple of years, and I mean that in the nicest possible way, not-for-profit baths run by locals, rooftop heatboxes charging a genuinely reasonable eleven pounds a session, little wooden cabins that have appeared in car parks and on canal boats and, in one memorable case I encountered while researching this piece, on what I am fairly sure used to be somebody’s allotment. London has decided, collectively and without much fanfare, that the answer to a stressful, overpriced, overstimulated city is occasionally to sit very still in extreme heat with a group of complete strangers and say almost nothing to each other.
I went to the Hackney rooftop saunas specifically, the ones National Geographic singled out for their sweeping skyline views, and I will admit the views genuinely are lovely, the kind of London panorama you normally only get from an expensive rooftop bar, except here you are getting it half naked and dripping, which does change the emotional register somewhat. Nobody was on their phone. This alone felt worth the entry fee. An entire room of Londoners, a species not typically known for voluntary phone abstinence, sitting quietly, occasionally exchanging a nod, mostly just breathing and sweating and looking at the city that usually demands so much from us, asking, for once, absolutely nothing at all.
There is something genuinely worth unpacking in why this specific, simple ritual has caught on so hard here specifically, in a city famous for its relentless pace. My theory, offered with no data whatsoever behind it beyond one very sweaty Tuesday evening, is that London gives us so few socially sanctioned excuses to just stop, and the sauna, culturally imported and thoroughly localised, has become exactly that: a room where doing nothing is not just acceptable but is, in fact, the entire point, in a city that otherwise treats stillness as a personal failing.
Whether it deserves a spot on a list alongside forest bathing in ancient Japanese woodland is, honestly, a genuinely fair question, and I went in prepared to be a bit sniffy about the comparison. I came out considerably less sniffy than I went in. There is something quietly radical about a city this expensive and this fast producing, almost by accident, one of its most talked-about recent wellness exports for the price of a couple of coffees.
Would I go back? Genuinely, yes, and I have already booked my next session, which is more than I can say for most trends this city convinces me to try. Sometimes the hype is, against every instinct I have as a professional cynic, entirely justified.
What I keep thinking about, a few days on, is a conversation I overheard while cooling off afterward, two strangers who had clearly never met before that exact evening, talking with real, unhurried ease about absolutely nothing important, the kind of conversation this city rarely seems to leave room for anymore. Somewhere between the heat and the stillness and the total absence of anyone checking their phone, something in the room had genuinely relaxed, and I include myself fully in that. I left lighter than I arrived, in a way that had very little to do with the calories burned sweating and everything to do with an hour spent, for once, doing absolutely nothing productive at all.
If National Geographic wants to send someone else out to verify the claim independently, I would happily go back a third time purely in the name of further research. Somebody has to keep checking.
More from this author at Lowri Griffiths, prat.uk.