Other Fold Sauna Co. — A New Kind of Neighbourhood Meeting Place

The Case for Communal Heat

London has become seriously interested in saunas over the past four years. What was once largely confined to health clubs, hotel spas and leisure centres has developed into an independent culture, led by Community Sauna Baths, which began in a Hackney Wick car park in 2022 and has since passed a quarter of a million bathers across six London sites. Small operators have followed into parks, waterfronts and neighbourhood spaces, and the capital now has more wood-fired sauna than at any point in its history.

Other Fold Sauna Co., run by James and Moni in the grounds of Boston Manor House in Brentford, is one of the more appealing examples. Its wood-burning sauna sits behind the house, beside the café and overlooking the lake, with a cold plunge, outdoor shower and two wooden changing huts completing the arrangement. There are no treatment menus and no spa circuit. The proposition is deliberately straightforward: heat, cold, fresh air and fifty minutes away from the usual distractions.

Communal sessions take up to eight people. What distinguishes the experience is the social balance. The atmosphere is sociable if you want it to be, and equally comfortable for anyone who would rather sit quietly. Conversation is an option rather than an expectation.

That distinction matters more than it sounds. The communal sauna can easily become another organised wellness activity, with an implied obligation to participate — to share, to introduce yourself, to make the session mean something. Other Fold avoids the problem by letting the shared environment do most of the work. People arrive alone or with friends, move between the heat and the deck, and decide for themselves how much company they want. Nobody is running the room, and nothing is being facilitated.

It is worth setting this against Nowhere Baths in Singapore, covered in an earlier edit, where phones are banned, groups are capped at three and the whole design points towards solitude. Both are good, and they want opposite things from the same forty or fifty minutes. Other Fold's achievement is that it leaves the choice with the bather rather than making it for them.

A Sauna That Belongs to Its Setting

The setting is a substantial part of the proposition, and it has a longer story than most sauna sites in London. Boston Manor House is a Jacobean manor built in 1622–23 for Lady Mary Reade, newly widowed and shortly to remarry. The Clitherow family owned it from 1670 until the 1920s, and when the last private owner sold up, Brentford Urban District Council bought the house and twenty surrounding acres and opened the grounds as a public park in 1924. The house was damaged by a V1 in the war, restored, and reopened by the Queen Mother in 1963. Most recently it reopened in July 2023 after a five-year restoration supported by the National Lottery Heritage Fund.

That gives the sauna a backdrop almost nothing else in the London scene can offer. The park runs down to the Grand Union Canal, which is a reminder that this corner of West London has been earning its living from passing traffic for well over two centuries, and the walk in past the manor house does more for the session than any amount of interior design would.

The sauna itself is wood-burning rather than electric, which is the distinction most of the newer commercial venues have quietly dropped in favour of controllability. Guests move between the sauna, the cold plunge and the outdoor shower at their own pace, with no instructor managing the cycle.

The facilities are simple and unapologetic about it. Changing is done in two wooden huts, and the whole arrangement is considerably more exposed to the weather than an indoor spa, which in a West London January is not a small consideration. Guests can use the bathrooms inside the Manor House and the toilets at The Potting Shed, though both are tied to café opening hours rather than the sauna's. None of this is a shortfall so much as a stated position: the money has gone into the sauna and the setting rather than into a circuit of rooms.

The Price of Participation

A standard communal session costs £18 per person for fifty minutes. Private hire of the whole sauna is £110 for the same fifty minutes for up to eight people, which works out at £13.75 each at full occupancy — cheaper per head than the communal session, and worth knowing if you can fill the benches.

Set against the rest of London, that is good value. Arc in Canary Wharf, the country's largest sauna and the venue that did most to make contrast therapy mainstream, charges £28 to £29 a session. Sauna & Plunge in Old Street is £30, 1Rebel Reset around £26, and hotel spas start at three figures and climb past £350. Only the not-for-profit community operators undercut Other Fold meaningfully, and none of them has a Jacobean manor and a lake.

The wider point is that a neighbourhood sauna only becomes interesting when it is somewhere people return to rather than visit once. Fifty minutes at £18 makes a weekly habit plausible in a way that a £29 guided class never does. Its real value lies in the possibility of becoming a familiar local fixture rather than an occasional indulgence.

Why It Earns Its Place

Other Fold succeeds because it understands that communal wellness does not have to be complicated. The combination of wood-fired heat, cold water and a parkland setting is appealing on its own, but the atmosphere is what gives the place its identity.

It offers a choice between conversation and quiet without making either feel out of place. In a city where wellness increasingly arrives packaged as an expensive individual pursuit, that is a refreshing proposition — and a sociable one that never becomes compulsory is harder to get right than it looks.

Other Fold is small, simple and deliberately informal. Those are strengths rather than shortcomings, provided visitors arrive with the right expectations.