The Gym Group Hackney is cheaper than us. Here is what the difference buys.

The Gym Group on Richmond Road is a good budget gym, and we would rather say so than pretend it is not. It is open around the clock, the kit is well kept, the classes are free with a membership, and it starts at £19.99 a month. If price is the thing that decides it, this page will not talk you out of it, and it should not. But a fair number of people make the fifteen minute walk north to Reading Lane anyway, and this is our honest account of why.

What The Gym Group Hackney gives you

It is at 282 Richmond Road, down by London Fields, and it is open twenty four hours a day, seven days a week. That is a genuine advantage over us and there is no honest way around it. If you train at two in the morning, we close at eleven and they do not close at all.

A membership includes the gym floor and the class timetable, which is broader than most people expect from a budget gym. A typical day runs eight classes of thirty to forty five minutes, with names like Strength 45, Hyrox Power, SGT Strength Barbells, Legs Bums and Tums, Fit Pump and Flexi-stretch, plus beginner Kickstart sessions twice a day. Named instructors take them, you book through the app up to a week ahead, and the popular ones do fill up. There are lockers, showers and free Wi-Fi. Personal training is there too, paid for separately by the session.

The price, once you read to the bottom

The £19.99 headline is the Standard plan, and it is a real price, plus a £10 joining fee. What it does not include is the things most people assume come as standard: access to other Gym Group sites, freezing your membership, guest passes and the progress tracking. Those sit on the Ultimate plan.

Ultimate on a rolling month is advertised at £26.99 for the first three months and £36.99 after that, again plus the £10 joining fee. Pay upfront instead and it is £309 for nine months, which is £34.33 a month, or £399 for twelve, which is £33.25. So the fair comparison is not £19.99 against our £55. It is closer to £36.99 against our £45 on a three month plan, and at that point the question stops being price and starts being what you get.

Where the two of us actually differ

The sauna is the easy one. It is included here and there is not one there, and after a heavy session in February that is worth more than it sounds.

The bigger one is coaching. Three personal training sessions come free when you join, and the eleven coaches who run our classes are on the floor rather than behind a desk, through the day, not only at peak. If you have ever stood in a budget gym wondering whether your deadlift is about to go wrong, that is the difference you are paying for. At The Gym Group you can absolutely get that, but you book it and you pay for it on top.

And then there is the room itself. We are one gym, in one place, and most of the people in it live or work within a mile. People know each other. Someone will spot you on a heavy set without being asked, and you will get your name learned by about the third visit. A chain with two hundred and fifty sites can be many good things, but that is a hard one to run at scale.

Which one you should pick

If you know exactly what you are doing, you train at odd hours, and you want the lowest possible monthly cost, go to The Gym Group. That is what it is for and it does it well. We would rather you did that than pay us more for something you were never going to use.

If you are less sure what you should be doing, or you want classes and coaching to be part of the deal rather than a separate purchase, or you simply want to train somewhere that feels like it belongs to the neighbourhood, come and look at what a membership covers. Everything is in one price, there is no joining fee, and you can start on a rolling month and leave whenever you like.

Walking between the two

Richmond Road to Reading Lane is around fifteen minutes on foot, north past London Fields and up towards the Town Hall. We are a couple of minutes from Hackney Central station on the Mildmay line, and about twelve from Hackney Downs, which connects through to Liverpool Street.

Hackney's independent community gym

We have been part of this corner of E8 for a long time, next to the Town Hall, the Empire and the library, a few minutes from Mare Street and the Narrow Way. If you want the longer version, we wrote a guide to the area we are part of.

Come and see for yourself

Come and train here once before you decide anything. The trial is free, we do not ask for a card, and there is no pressure at the end of it. Take a class, use the floor, sit in the sauna, and see whether the difference is worth it to you.