Rent fight brings City Hall to Putney’s 98-year-old gym

London Assembly Members will visit Putney’s oldest gym next Wednesday to see for themselves its rent fight with Transport for London’s property company.

They are due at 2pm on Wednesday 19 August at Physical Culture, the gym under the railway arches on Winthorpe Road. The Green Party’s Benali Hamdache and the Conservatives’ Andrew Boff are coming; they is waiting to hear whether a Labour Assembly Member will join them. Fleur Anderson, Putney’s MP, and three Wandsworth councillors, among them council leader Robert Morritt, are copied into the arrangements, which the gym shared with Putney.news.

The campaign to save the 98-year-old gym began with a residents’ nomination in February. Six months later it has a cross-party delegation from City Hall.

Places for London, the Transport for London company that owns the arches and has been raising rents across its estate, put the gym’s rent up from £26,500 to £41,500 a year after the pandemic. It first proposed £45,000, a figure the gym brought down by paying a chartered surveyor to negotiate. From November it wants a further rise of inflation plus one percentage point.

Chris Quinn, who has run the gym since the late 1980s, says the current rent is already more than the business can bear. “The problem for us is that everything was fine up to the pandemic, and since the pandemic we’ve just been in survival mode,” he told the Local Democracy Reporting Service last month.

The gym won Asset of Community Value status from Wandsworth Council earlier this year, which means it cannot be sold out from under its members without warning. The listing says nothing about what a landlord can charge in rent.

From the arches to City Hall

The question the visit poses is whether political attention can move a commercial landlord. A meeting convened by the Mayor of London’s team in May, for community venues under threat, ended with both sides as far apart as they arrived. Places for London said a rent cut was not viable; Quinn said he did not accept that any increase on an unaffordable rent could be manageable.

Since then the gym has taken its case to City Hall itself. Ahead of rent negotiations this month it briefed Hamdache’s office, asking for “strategic advice, political leverage points”. It has asked that any Labour visitor on Wednesday should be someone other than Leonie Cooper, who saw the site in May, so that one more Assembly Member gets a first look at the arches.

The negotiation, meanwhile, has stalled. A meeting with Places for London and City Hall’s Culture at Risk officers, set for 4 August, was cancelled, the gym says, after its financial accounts went to an officer who had left the team and never reached the right people in time.

The campaign’s ask is a social value rent: rent set with a venue’s community role weighed in, not just the market rate. It is an idea a London Assembly committee has examined, and one the gym says its landlord wants to bypass in the negotiations.

Places for London says it wants the gym to survive. “We recognise Physical Culture’s history and contributions, and are working closely with them and the Greater London Authority to ensure it continues to be financially viable and ensure the gym can continue to run for many years to come,” a spokesperson said last month.

Physical Culture opened in 1928 and has trained Olympians, a World’s Strongest Man winner and Sean Connery. George Hackenschmidt, the first World Heavyweight Wrestling Champion, was a vice president in the 1950s. The gym takes new members at physicalculture.co.uk, with no joining fee.