Hard Up Thursdays starts on March 3rd at Sweatbox, Soho’s hottest 24-hour gay gym and sauna. QXMEN grabbed Sweatbox’s Mark Ford to find out some details…
So, Hard Up Thursdays… Is that the same as Hard Up Mondays, just on a Thursday?
Pretty much. Our Monday nights have become ridiculously busy with lines out the door from about 4pm to 9pm, so we’ve decided to spread the load over two nights a week. So on both Mondays and Thursdays, 8am – midnight, anyone 25 or under can come in for free providing they bring photo ID with proof of age. They’re required to leave a £10 deposit but as long as they before midnight, they get that back. One small change though: From now on the Under 25’s on these nights either have to pay to hire towels (£1 per towel) or bring their own. For some reason the Under 25 guys use an excessive amount of towels, which was overloading our machines and meant sometimes we were running out. So we’ve brought this in to hopefully thin out the excessive towel use. Paying customers and members will be getting 2 towels for free upfront on these days.
Some people are saying that online and app-based hook-up sites are partly to blame for some of the country’s once popular gay saunas going out of business… Would you agree with them?
We opened Sweatbox in the week that the government officially announced that we were in recession and just after London Gays had gone Grindr crazy. So we really don’t have any experience of the so-called “Golden Days of saunas”. Before Jason and I opened Sweatbox, we went around the other saunas (purely for research, of course!) What we found then (8 years ago) was an ageing customer base. That’s not a criticism of those saunas – nothing me makes me madder than the nasty, bullying ageism that I’ve read in recent articles about the closing saunas. But we felt that this older age range was being adequately catered for. What was missing was the younger generation. We figured that for a lot of younger guys their sauna experiences were influenced by the fact that they weren’t seeing anyone else of their own age there, which can be quite intimidating. So we felt there was a gap in the market and purposefully focussed Sweatbox on a younger demographic. Our Under 25 nights were a part of that and it’s worked. We’re now by far the youngest, busiest sauna in London. In fact, sometimes a bit too busy, hence the new Hard Up Thursdays.
• Sweatbox Sauna, Ramillies House, 1-2 Ramillies Street, Soho, London W1F 7LN