The Gym Group has applied to open a 24-hour gym above Boots on Putney High Street. It doesn’t need planning permission to do it, and it isn’t shy about saying so: neighbours won’t get a say.
The Gym Group would take over the entire first floor, created by knocking together the former upper floors of Robert Dyas and Boots, with access from the existing side entrance to the left of the old Robert Dyas shopfront. No external building work is planned. Downstairs would stay in retail use, with Boots continuing to trade on the ground floor and the former Robert Dyas unit currently empty beside it.
The application, reference 2026/2582, was registered with Wandsworth Council earlier this month. Filed under section 192 of the Town and Country Planning Act 1990, it seeks a Lawful Development Certificate rather than planning permission, arguing that switching from shop to gym doesn’t legally count as development at all. Both uses fall under the same planning category, Class E, and the site has been in retail use under that category since at least 2008.
In a somewhat unusual approach, the planning letter to the council spells out what that means for residents. There is no statutory requirement to consult neighbours, it states, and third-party views on the merits of the case “are irrelevant when determining the application.” As the letter puts it a second time: “planning merits are not relevant at any stage in this particular application process.”
Why the determination to let people know what Putney residents think is irrelevant? In March, the site’s landlord, Fortune Green Capital, applied to wrap the same building in an illuminated advertising hoarding for nine months.
The Putney Society was not impressed and objected, calling it “an excuse for an advertising hoarding” with “no real plan for the site,” and noting that scaffolding permitted at the block next door had stayed up for years with no work ever done. Wandsworth approved the hoarding anyway, with some conditions.
The council’s planning portal is technically open for comments on the case. But an LDC application turns on a legal test, not a judgement call, so any comments about noise, footfall or the merits of a 24-hour gym opening above the high street carry no weight, as the agent has been keen to point out. A decision is due by 10 September.
The first floor has stood empty for years. After squatters occupied the wider block in 2025, professional property guardians moved in above the old Robert Dyas unit, a stopgap rather than a solution. Boots itself has looked increasingly tired: the shop pays £90,000 a year on a lease that runs to November 2028, but the lease sits outside the legal protection that would normally guarantee it can renew, so Fortune Green Capital could end the tenancy early with nine months’ notice and a payout. In the window of the vacant Robert Dyas unit, a “Putney in the Past” display put up by the High Street BID to brighten the vacancy has started to peel, which feels about right for a building whose recent history reads like a run of bad luck.
The Gym Group is one of Britain’s biggest low-cost gym chains, with more than 250 sites nationally. The company says 35 per cent of its members have never been to a gym before. If the certificate is granted, it can fit out the space and open, whatever the neighbours make of a 24-hour gym moving in above their heads.
And so the ‘ensh*ttification of everything’ continues.