Walk Upper Richmond Road this week and you can see the same pattern we reported on Putney High Street last week playing out 500 metres away. New businesses are arriving. Old ones have quietly gone. Some gaps are filling. Some are not.
The most striking arrival is Pulse Club at number 228. The sauna and cold plunge venue opened this month in the former Heba Pilates gym, a space that itself closed unexpectedly and left Phoenix Yoga scrambling for a new home before eventually securing the unit next door. Founder Kieran Beeson’s first Pulse Club is on North End Road in Fulham. This is his second.
The concept is heat, cold, repeat: a communal Finnish sauna for up to 25 people, four cold plunge pools (two at 3–4°C, two at around 10°C), 50-minute sessions from 7am to 9pm. If you want to try it, the intro offer is £39 for three sessions. Founding memberships start at £99 a month, though the cheapest tier is around 95% sold. Packages run at £105 for five sessions, £200 for ten. Book through the app or at pulseclubsauna.com.
Phoenix Yoga is right next door. Between a sauna, a cold plunge club and a yoga studio, this end of Upper Richmond Road has quietly become somewhere you come to look after yourself.
Further along, a different kind of arrival. The new office building at 175 Upper Richmond Road is complete and looking for tenants: over 39,000 sq ft of commercial space being marketed by Savills and Bray Fox Smith. It is a big presence on the road. Whether it fills quickly will say something about local demand for premium office space in SW15.
La Belle Putney Nails has opened at 218, in a unit that had been empty. Putney has no shortage of nail salons on this stretch.
Then there are the places that haven’t changed. The Bubble East Cafe has been dark for more than a year. The former Oasis charity shop at 195 is cleared out and on the market, Houston Lawrence advertising it as flexible commercial space. Number 220, next door to La Belle, is still shuttered.
Upper Richmond Road is not in crisis. The new arrivals are real, and some of them are genuinely interesting. But the gaps are real too. A road that is partly regenerating and partly waiting is a road in between things. Right now, URR is both.
