Work it! Where London's elite really do business

Forget the Garrick, the real networking is now done in high-end gyms that cost up to £10,000 a year. Will Hosie reveals where the 1% do their deals, and the spot each industry likes best

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Y OU heard it here first premium gyms are the new members' clubs. Amid all the brouhaha about the Garrick Club, which has now voted to allow women as members, no one ever stopped to think about who the true power players are. And, more crucially, where they really go to network. It's not Hugh Bonneville or Michael Gove and the answer is not 15 Garrick Street. Consider who really pulls the strings in society: the chief executives, billionaires and savvy technocrats; those in the City who took one look at the mini-Budget in 2022, said a simple No, and ended Liz Truss's premiership.

The cultural power players (such as Kate Moss) might still elect Annabel's to launch their wellness ranges, but the moguls are increasingly cutting their deals somewhere less obvious - the treadmill. Though they may, of course, still be rubbing shoulders in the weights area with the A-list glamazons.

They might take a client out to Maison Estelle for a meet-and-greet but the quiet chat happens somewhere much louder: the oontz-oontz-powered training floor. "Lift!" the instructor commands, while electronic dance music blasts through the gym speakers, providing the cover for one investor to whisper to another: "Let's negotiate." Nowhere are the dealmakers more naked, in every sense, than in the sauna, where "the conversation" typically happens. I know this, because I've witnessed it: in Third Space, a gym so plush that the sauna has a rose quartz wall. Much of this gym-networking phenomenon is an inheritance from Covid.