The £200 Bath: How London Turned Sitting in Water Into an Industry Worth Billions and Nobody Questioned Whether This Was Necessary
There is a bath in your house. If you live in a flat — and if you live in London, there is approximately a 70% chance that you do — there is a bath in your bathroom, or possibly a shower, or possibly both, crammed into a space so small that using either of them requires the sort of spatial awareness that would serve you well in a submarine. This bath is free. You can fill it with water at any time. You can add bubbles, if you like. You can light a candle. You can sit in it for as long as you wish, in silence, thinking about nothing, and it will cost you approximately 30p in water and electricity.
And yet. London has, over the past decade, developed an industry devoted entirely to the proposition that sitting in water is something that requires a professional environment, specialist equipment, and a price tag that would, in most contexts, be considered extraordinary. The wellness spa industry in London is worth, by various estimates, somewhere in the region of £800 million a year. It employs thousands of people. It occupies some of the most desirable real estate in the city. And it is built, at its foundation, on the idea that the simple, ancient, deeply human act of having a bath has become something that needs to be optimised, curated, and monetised.
The London Prat spent a month investigating London's wellness spa scene. We visited 20 spas. We had 40 treatments. We spent £4,200 in total, which Sandra authorised with a grimace and the words "This had better be good." It was not bad. It was, in many cases, genuinely pleasant. But it was also, as we shall see, one of the most elaborate exercises in the art of making people pay a great deal of money for things they could, with very little effort, do themselves.
The Spa: A Tour
Walking into a London wellness spa is an experience designed, from the moment you step through the door, to make you feel that you have left the city behind and entered somewhere calmer, quieter, and more spiritually nourishing. The reception area is lit with soft, amber light. There is music playing — not pop music, not classical music, but a third category of music that exists solely in spas and that consists of sounds that might be nature (birds, water, wind) or might be someone playing a synthesiser in a dark room. There are candles. There are always candles. There is a woman behind the desk who speaks in a voice so gentle and so measured that you immediately begin to lower yours in response, as though you have entered a library or a church or a place where loud voices are not merely discouraged but would constitute a kind of spiritual violence.
She hands you a robe. The robe is white. It is always white. White robes are the universal symbol of wellness, in the same way that red carpets are the universal symbol of glamour. You put on the robe. You feel, immediately, slightly more relaxed, not because the robe is particularly comfortable — it is, in fact, slightly too large and slightly too warm — but because the robe is a signal. It tells you: you are here now. You are in a space where relaxation is the only thing expected of you. You can stop performing. You can stop being productive. You can simply... be.
And then you are shown to the treatment room, where a woman with very calm hands asks you where you are holding tension, and you say "everywhere," because you live in London and tension is the default state of existence, and she nods as though this is exactly what she expected, and she puts warm stones on your back, and for forty-five minutes you feel, genuinely, better.
It costs £120.
The Treatments: What You Are Actually Paying For
London spas offer a bewildering range of treatments, each one with a name that sounds like it was invented by someone who had access to a thesaurus and an unlimited imagination. The London Prat catalogued the treatments available at the 20 spas we visited and found, in total, 340 different options. They ranged from the familiar (massage, facial, manicure) to the unusual (hot stone therapy, hydrotherapy, cryotherapy) to the genuinely baffling (a treatment called "Aura Cleansing" that costs £95 and involves someone waving their hands near your body without touching it, and which is described on the spa's website as "removing negative energy from your energetic field," a sentence that contains no words that are individually meaningless but which, taken together, forms a statement that is impossible to verify or falsify in any way whatsoever).
Augusta Pemberton-Hale tried 15 of these treatments over the course of the month. Her notes on each one are a masterclass in the art of being politely bewildered. On the massage: "Lovely. Exactly what it sounds like. My shoulders, which have been held at approximately ear level for the past three years due to stress, finally descended to their correct position. Worth every penny." On the facial: "A woman put various substances on my face. Some of them smelled nice. Some of them felt nice. I am not sure whether my face looks any different afterwards, but I am told it does, and I choose to believe this." On the Aura Cleansing: "A woman stood next to me and moved her hands in slow circles approximately six inches from my skin. She did this for twenty minutes. She then told me that my aura was 'much brighter' than when I had arrived. I thanked her. I paid £95. I left feeling no different from when I had arrived, but also not feeling cheated, which is itself a kind of achievement, and which I suspect is the entire point of the exercise."
The Float Tank: The Ultimate Bath
Of all the treatments available in London's spa industry, the one that most directly confronts the question of "why are we paying for this?" is the float tank. A float tank is a dark, enclosed, soundproof pod filled with water that has been mixed with so much salt that you float on the surface without any effort. You get in. You close the lid. You lie in darkness and silence for between 60 and 90 minutes. You float. That is the entire experience.
Float tanks cost between £50 and £80 per session in London. The idea behind them is that the total absence of sensory input — no light, no sound, no physical sensation beyond the gentle buoyancy of the water — allows the mind to enter a state of profound relaxation, sometimes described as "a meditation deeper than sleep." People who use float tanks regularly report reduced anxiety, improved creativity, and a general sense of wellbeing that they attribute to the experience of being, for an hour, completely cut off from the world.
Augusta tried a float tank. Her report was characteristically honest: "It was strange. For the first ten minutes, I could not stop thinking. My brain, deprived of input, simply generated its own input, which consisted primarily of a mental replay of every embarrassing thing I have ever done, in chronological order. By minute twenty, the replays had stopped and I was simply floating, thinking about nothing, which felt extraordinary. By minute forty, I had fallen asleep. By minute sixty, I was woken by a gentle knock on the lid, which nearly gave me a heart attack. I emerged feeling, I must admit, genuinely refreshed. Whether this was because of the float tank or because I had simply had an hour of uninterrupted sleep in a dark room, I cannot say. The effect was the same either way."
The London Prat then pointed out that Augusta could have achieved a similar result by lying in her bath in the dark for an hour, for free. Augusta considered this. "Yes," she said. "But would I have done it? Honestly? No. I would have checked my phone. I would have felt guilty about not being productive. The float tank worked, in part, because I had paid £65 for it, and paying £65 for something means you take it seriously. If it were free, I would have treated it as optional. Because it cost money, I treated it as essential. And that, I think, is the real secret of the wellness industry. It doesn't sell you relaxation. It sells you permission to relax. And permission, in London, is worth whatever you're willing to pay for it."
The Wellness Industrial Complex
The wellness industry — of which London spas are merely one tentacle — is, globally, worth approximately $5.6 trillion. Yes. Trillion. This is more than the GDP of most countries. It is an industry built on the proposition that wellbeing is something that must be purchased, rather than something that can be cultivated through the simple, free, ancient practices of rest, fresh air, exercise, and the occasional bath in your own home.
Miriam Toad, The London Prat's economics columnist, wrote about this in a recent Prat Report: "The wellness industry is, in essence, the monetisation of the basic human need to not feel terrible. Previous generations addressed this need through sleep, nature, community, and the occasional glass of wine. The current generation addresses it through £200 spa days, £45 meditation apps, and supplements that cost more per month than most people's groceries. The result is an industry that has made feeling better into something you have to pay for, which means that the people who need to feel better the most — the people who are stressed, anxious, and overwhelmed — are also the people who are spending the most money, which makes them more stressed, more anxious, and more overwhelmed, which makes them spend more money, which is — and I say this with no small amount of professional satisfaction — one of the most elegant feedback loops in the history of capitalism."
Sandra read this and said: "Print it." Derek ate a biscuit. It was not a wellness biscuit. It was a Hobnob. It cost 12p. It did not claim to cleanse his aura or remove negative energy from his energetic field. It simply tasted like a biscuit, which was, in the end, all he had ever wanted.
Read more wellness satire and lifestyle coverage at prat.uk.