Yoga studios in London

Across north London, yoga is taught in independent studios that combine vinyasa, yin and hot yoga with Pilates, barre, sound baths and recovery, pairing their weekly timetables with workshops, treatments and monthly special sessions.

This article brings together a selection of yoga studios in London: The Reset Rooms, The Good Rooms and MakeYoga. Three north London studios, in Crouch End, Muswell Hill and Highgate, with different ways of approaching the practice.

The Reset Rooms is a movement and recovery studio at 46 The Broadway, Crouch End, N8, where Reformer Pilates, yoga, mat Pilates, strength, sauna and cold plunge share one building and one membership. Becky Chalmers founded the studio and runs it day to day. She danced professionally, spent seven years as company manager of a yoga and Pilates studio and was Head of Yoga at 3Tribes London, where she led the 200-hour teacher training.

Yoga, mat Pilates, strength and sound sessions take place in the Mat Room, in heated and non-heated classes. The yoga timetable includes Vinyasa in three forms, Hatha, Restorative and Yin, as well as the studio’s signature Hot Reset sequence. Special workshops run every Saturday on subjects such as pranayama, yoga nidra, sound journeys, kirtan with live musicians and yin intensives. Jill Patterson is Director of Yoga, and Norman Blair leads the yin classes.

The Reformer Room has ten Technogym beds, with every class capped at ten and a timetable of Contemporary Reformer, Traditional Reformer and Barreformer. The Recovery Room, ten steps from the studio floor, holds an infrared sauna and a cold plunge, with 60-minute sessions for up to five people aged over 18.

New clients can take a two-week introductory offer that covers unlimited Reformer Pilates, Mat Room classes and sauna and plunge sessions, with no commitment and no auto-renewal. The building also has gender-inclusive changing rooms, showers and digital lockers.

The Good Rooms is an independent hot yoga and Pilates studio at 56 Muswell Hill, N10. Studio director Jamie and the team opened it in January 2019 and relaunched it as The Good Rooms in the summer of 2021. Since then it has grown from one room to three: a hot room upstairs for group classes and two treatment rooms downstairs.

The timetable includes five types of hot yoga, all open to beginners and advanced practitioners: Flow, a hot vinyasa class; Bliss, a slow-flowing practice with longer holds; Original, based on the classic 26-posture sequence and taught without music; Reset, the studio’s slowest and most meditative class, practised entirely on the floor; and a warm yin class followed by a gong bath of 20 to 25 minutes.

Its hot Pilates classes include Dynamic Hot Pilates, which blends Pilates technique with high-intensity exercises in a room heated to 38C; a weighted version with light dumbbells; and Power Core Pilates, built around the Pilates ring and suited to people recovering from injury or back pain. The teaching team includes former professional dancers and competitive athletes, and the studio also holds immersions such as cacao ceremonies with sound baths.

Downstairs, practitioners offer acupuncture, craniosacral therapy, Thai yoga massage and osteopathy, and the treatment rooms can also be hired by local therapists. The studio runs on electricity from renewable sources, uses a heat recovery system in its hot room and is carbon negative, offsetting more carbon than it uses through Carbon Footprint.

MakeYoga is a yoga, Pilates and barre studio on Highgate High Street, on the ground floor of The Lion House, a ten-minute walk from Highgate and Archway stations. Its founder, Viola, is a yoga, meditation and breathwork teacher who began practising 17 years ago, has taught a range of styles around London for nearly a decade and has studied with teachers such as David Swenson and Patrick Beach.

The timetable runs from Vinyasa Flow and Slow Flow, a gentler class for those new to yoga, to Hatha, Yin and 4Beat Flow, a music-driven vinyasa style created in London and born out of the Rocket Yoga system. Pilates is taught in several formats, from fundamentals to dynamic and cardio classes with props, alongside barre classes that draw on Pilates, yoga and dance.

On the last Friday of every month, Deep Rest Friday combines a yoga nidra meditation with a sound bath of crystal bowls and chimes, while the Yoga Lab Series offers 90-minute deep-dive classes on peak poses. The teaching team includes specialists in pranayama and in restorative and pre and postnatal yoga, and Viola has hosted retreats and workshops in the UK and abroad.

The studio blends Scandinavian style with Indian influences, with wooden floors, whitewashed walls and large dual-aspect windows. Its 50 square metre main room holds 19 mats and a barre wall system, with a kitchenette and lounge alongside, and the space is also available for hire.