The rise of budget gyms

Originally written for The Guardian

easyGym, Wood Green. Photo: Mohammad Hoseini

Poor gyms. They’ve suffered a few knocks recently. First there was an OFT investigation into unfair membership contracts. Then there was the Twitterstorm when LA Fitness refused to cancel the contract of a couple when the woman had fallen pregnant and the man had lost his job. And this double-dipper recession certainly isn’t helping membership numbers.

But out of the ashes rises a phoenix – in the form of no-contract, budget operators. A few weeks ago, not one but two leaflets advertising new no-contract gyms in my area dropped through my door. One was from The Gym Group, which has been on the scene since 2008 and currently has 20 gyms across England, with plans to open 20 more by the end of the year. The other leaflet was bright orange and familiarly fonted – easyGym; yes, Stelios has entered the fitness market.

Book Review: What the Grown-Ups Were Doing, Michele Hanson

Written for Time Out

Growing up in suburban London in the 1950s as an odd-looking Jewish tom-boy, with a ‘pin head, and staggeringly ugly profile’ wasn’t much fun for Michele Hanson. Suburban Ruislip, with its ‘one cinema, and the lido and woods’ didn’t offer many thrills. But, lucky for us, 50 years on it provides an amusing read.

Covering the years from naïve child to questioning teen, the memoir charts the vicissitudes and enlightenment of this transition. Hanson attempts to understand her family, her Jewishness, and the surprising facts of life – from the shouting, farting and general vulgarity of her mum and dad (‘I did not want to hear my parents laughing loudly and crudely at things to do with sex and bottoms, or using Yiddish words beginning with “schm …”) to her own somewhat painful developments (‘Bosoms were the last thing I wanted … There was something terrifying about them.’).

Dashes of flavour mark place, as well as time. We visit the seedy Soho of the 1950s, where Hanson’s father owned a belt factory and her mother opened the second-ever Soho coffee bar; and where later on, Hanson is horrified by the goings-on at the Heaven and Hell bar on Old Compton Street. Quentin Crisp appears as a life model at the Ealing Art College where Hanson is a student, with his ‘bouffant purple hair, purple nails, eye make-up, and rather worryingly loose jock-strap.’

The book is filled with the Guardian columnist’s trademark warmth and wry humour, despite the ever-present backdrop of the recent war and the difficulties facing Jewish families at that time.