An underprivileged neighborhood of London is helping the locals get healthy by regenerating a 1920′s Victorian Turkish Bath House. With more than $9 million spent in redevelopment, the building is set to turn Bethnal Green’s poverty stricken York Hall around for the better.

Tower Hamlets is ranked as one of the five most deprived areas suffering one of the highest population densities in inner London. Such dire circumstances often go hand-in-hand with crime, unemployment and poor health, but the local council has helped revive this tired community with with public baths, a gymnasium, boxing gym, public hall, swimming pool and day spa, all with subsidised rates for locals.

A small committee of locals teamed together to come up with the developments and now York Hall is the only public sector-run spa in the UK. Consisting of a sauna, aroma steam room, tepidarium (warm, dry room), caladarium (steam baths), laconium (gentle heat bath), ice fountain, monsoon showers and hamman (steam room), York Hall is a mix of the old and the new. Visitors can roam the several heated rooms, lay in the dark wood sauna, take a lavender infused monsoon shower or make their way through the three heated dry rooms.

For more information visit www.spa-london.org.

—Retna Wooller