UPDATE: As of last Friday (January 19), the Finnish Sauna Bath officially received ‘listed’ status from Historic England. It is now a Grade II-listed structure.
Have you ever heard of the 1948 Austerity Olympics? While London was still recovering from all of the damage of the war, it decided to welcome athletes from all over the world for a back-to-basics, make-do-and-mend edition of the Olympic Games.
No new sporting venues were built, but a Finnish company did donate a modest new sauna to the temporary athletes village. Once the games were over the sauna, housed in a prefab wooden hut, was moved to Maidstone in Kent. It is now one of the only surviving buildings from the Austerity Olympics and the UK’s oldest functioning sauna – and it’s at the centre of a new heritage campaign.
The facilities were used for decades by members of the Cobdown sauna club until 2020, when it failed a safety inspection. Inspectors found faulty electrics and a broken sauna oven but members couldn’t afford repairs. An application for listed status was submitted to Historic England, with the intention to then apply for a grant to bring the historic sauna back to life.
The campaign was being led by Jukka Siukosaari, the Finnish ambassador to the UK. Siukosaari told the Guardian that the sauna’s preservation is important ‘not only because of its unique architecture, but also for its history relating to Finnish-British relations and what it means for our common sporting history’.
The sauna’s secretary and treasurer Richard Young told the publication: ‘It’s not just a sauna, it’s a club. If you go to a leisure centre, it’s noisy, there’s a mixture of lots of sorts of people, but we’re all friends together and we’ve missed the companionship. It’s relaxing. It’s original. It’s authentic, it’s different.’
Here are a few pics of the sauna, in all its glory.
Check out our lists of the best saunas in London and finest spas in the capital.
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