Save the Y!

On Monday, 2 December 2024, London’s central YMCA – the world’s first – posted an ‘Important Update’ on Instagram. ‘After nearly fifty years,’ it said, ‘we have today announced the sale and pending closure of our 112 Great Russell Street site.’ The club would cease trading on 7 February 2025.

Situated across three basement floors of a huge brutalist edifice that also includes two hotels, a casino, two hair salons, an electronics store and several cafés and restaurants, the Y is a unique facility. Affordable, accessible and open long hours, it is central London’s largest gym, with a swimming pool, badminton courts, a basketball court, two floors of machines, a weights room, several dance studios, a yoga studio, and spaces used for youth training programmes, community initiatives, adult education and holiday camps for local schoolchildren. As the display boards left over from a past promotional campaign declare, it’s ‘more than just a gym’.

On the morning after the closure was announced, tearful members were being consoled by staff – themselves facing imminent joblessness – as they came to terms with the idea that the doors would soon be shutting for good. The sale to Criterion Capital, a property company that already operates a ‘capsule hotel’ in what used to be the building’s car park, had already been finalised. Neither staff nor members had been consulted. Many only learned the news when they turned up for their regular classes. More than once in the days that followed, I heard someone observe that the club is ‘a lifeline for some people’, before rephrasing: ‘It’s been a lifeline for me.’ One man said to his friend: ‘It’s the only thing keeping us alive.’

Many people have been working out and socialising at the Y for decades, some of them since before the current building was opened in 1976. The oldest member, Basil, who visits every day, is in his late eighties. But the club is also used by local schools. Generations of inner-city children have learned to swim there. Joshua von Uexkull, who now works as a lifeguard and fitness adviser at the Y, first went there as a toddler. On 9 December he co-led a delegation to Camden’s refurbished Town Hall on Judd Street. In the course of the meeting, two councillors received standing ovations on declaring themselves to be former members of the club – apparently the only time that the obligatory ‘statements of interest’ have met with such a response.

The campaign to the save the Y, which made a second representation to the council this week, is requesting a six-month pause to the sale of the club: time for community groups to arrange for alternative provision, or to come to an understanding with the new owners of the site. But questions remain about why the trustees and executive board of the Central YMCA – which is a registered charity – acted as they did. When the Y faced closure in the early 1990s, its future was discussed in the House of Lords and the club was ultimately saved. This time the sale wasn’t publicised until it was too late. The charity’s communiqués refer to ‘stakeholders’ and ‘beneficiaries’, but these groups don’t appear to match up with the club’s almost seven thousand members or its many unaffiliated users.

One of the alternative facilities suggested to members, the Jubilee Hall Trust in Covent Garden, is itself under threat of closure. The loss of such places makes London less habitable, less healthy, less happy. In the same week that the closure was announced, the work and pensions secretary, Liz Kendall, published the Get Britain Working White Paper. Its press release quotes the prime minister lamenting the poor physical and mental health of a nation trapped in a debilitating ‘inactivity spiral’. Closing the Y – which is in Keir Starmer’s constituency – is the opposite of a solution. The club will be open for at least another couple of weeks – and, with luck, another six months or even more – at 112 Great Russell Street, floors -1 to -3.