Putney’s oldest gym has won protected status from Wandsworth Council, the first gym in Putney to be listed as an Asset of Community Value. The listing stops anyone selling the building from under its members. It does nothing about the rent, which is the threat that could still close it.
Physical Culture has trained people under the District Line arches on Winthorpe Road since 1928. Its members had campaigned since January to have it recognised, and on 19 May the council added it to the register of community assets, with the protection running for five years. We first reported the campaign in February. The status, created under the Localism Act 2011, gives the community the right to bid if the owner ever tries to sell.
But the owner is not trying to sell. The owner is trying to put the rent up. Physical Culture’s landlord is Places for London, the commercial property arm of Transport for London, which has been raising rents across its arches, and the listing does nothing to cap what a landlord can charge.
That fight had already come to a head two weeks before the listing was confirmed. On 11 May, the gym sat down with Places for London at a meeting convened by the Mayor of London’s team for community venues under threat. Both sides left exactly as far apart as they arrived. Places for London said a rent reduction was not viable, but that any increase would be affordable. The gym’s director, Christopher Quinn, said the rent is already more than it can bear and asked for a rent reduction. He told the meeting he did not accept that any increase on an already unaffordable rent could be manageable.
The Mayor’s team offered a way out: business advice, and help applying for grants. Then Quinn pointed out the trap in it. Securing institutional grants becomes increasingly difficult, if not impossible, as a lease nears its end, he noted, because funders will not put money into a tenancy that might not survive. The rescue on offer, in other words, gets harder to reach the longer the rent stays unsettled.
Quinn also disputes how the increase has been worked out. Places for London has pointed to a rise pegged to inflation plus one percentage point, known as RPI+1%. Quinn says that does not match the terms of Physical Culture’s own lease, and that the last increase rested on what he calls an inappropriate comparison.
None of this is what an Asset of Community Value listing was built to stop. The scheme protects buildings from being sold out from under the people who use them. It says nothing about whether those people can afford to stay. Physical Culture is exactly the kind of place it was meant to honour: 98 years on the same arches, run by Quinn since the late 1980s, the strongman George Hackenschmidt among its vice presidents in the 1950s, more than 1,600 people through its doors across its history. It is also exactly the kind of place a rent rise can close regardless.
At the meeting, Places for London said it had no intention of evicting the gym and recognised its value. Leonie Cooper, who attended as a London Assembly member, took the same line on the rent: no cut, but support for an increase the gym can manage. The parties agreed to keep talking, with a review of the gym’s finances, a session with a business consultant and a further meeting to come.
Anyone who wants to back the gym can join through physicalculture.co.uk, which charges no joining fee, or follow the Friends of Physical Culture campaign that won it its protection. The gym sits in Thamesfield ward, whose councillors and the Putney MP, Fleur Anderson, are aware of the case. The Mayor’s culture-at-risk team can be reached at cultureatrisk@london.gov.uk.
The members won what they set out to win. For five years, no one can sell the building from under them. But protection from sale was never the gym’s problem. The rent is. And on the rent, nothing has been settled.
