Pop-up spa and bar in East London to help Londoners feel happy

A new affordable pop-up spa and bar in East London has been created to help Londoners feel happy and relaxed.

The Barking Bathhouse, built by Something & Son, in Barking provides affordable spa treatments as well as a free social space for people to meet and opened in summer.

The spa is part of the Mayor's Outer London Fund projects for Barking and Dagenham Council and combines a spa with a healthy cocktails bar under a canopy of growing cucumbers.

Visitors can sunbathe in seaside-inspired pebble bays and spa treatments, including massages, body treatments, manicures and pedicures, use natural produce grown by local allotment gardeners.

There is a traditional wooden sauna and a cold room lined with ice blocks to bring the traditional bathhouse rituals to the experience plus a series of massage and treatment rooms and a relaxation area with loungers.

To reduce excessive water use the Bathhouse doesn't have communal pools or hot tubs. Shingle dunes provide space to relax and unwind between treatments.

In the bar, cocktails, smoothies, snacks and spa treatments are offered on the bar menu and the cucumber canopy above the bar provides fresh produce for use in beauty treatments.

The purpose-built design of the Bathhouse is inspired by 20th century working men's bathhouses, ultra modern spas and Barking’s industrial heritage.

The Bathhouse also runs an events programme with workshops, talks and discussions with happiness and wellbeing as the central ethos.

Andrew Merritt of Something & Son said: “Ideally relaxation should be an everyday experience and we wanted to design a space that can increase happiness and explore ideas of relaxation in an urban context. The juxtaposition of traditional spa techniques and the industrial setting will create a raw but very human space.”