An Exercising Tale
This is the story of a failure, albeit a highly instructive one. I wrote a couple of months back about the fight between customers of LA Fitness and the new owners of the chain, Pure Gym, who wanted to close the pools and facilities of 30 of the 43 LA Fitness gyms. That fight has now been comprehensively lost.
LA Fitness is a mid range health and fitness company and Pure Gym is a newer variety, a basic, low cost gym. Membership costs for Pure Gym are around half of those for LA Fitness but it is basic- members swipe in, there are only machines, no cafe,personal trainers,saunas and- importantly- no pool. When members of various LA Fitness gyms across England heard about the plans to sell some were vocal in their opposition, arranged community action, got media interest, threatened to resign membership etc.
LA Fitness had, until 22 December, a gym in Highgate/ Kentish Town (interest declaration- all my neighbours ran the campaign to keep their fitness pool at the gym). Plans for closure had enraged the users of the gym,some of them elderly, some with small children who learnt to swim there, some who just enjoyed what they and the LA Fitness staff( now mostly out of jobs) had built up at LA Fitness- a community and social centre.
The campaign was great. The LA Fitness clients got Duncan Goodhew and Sharron Davies to support them; they got Camden Council to declare the gym and pool an Asset of Community Value(ACV); they got local MP Keir Starmer and Dame Tessa Jowell to back them. They wrote letters to Pure Gym, they met Humphrey Cobbold, Pure Gym’s CEO, for an unproductive meeting.
They got petitions together, they produced figures about how many children had learnt to swim at the pool. In other words they indicated as fully and strongly and accurately as they could, how a business venture had for the past 15 years benefitted a local community which had paid for it but which had also turned it into a true community asset.
And precisely none of it made any difference.Which is why it seems worth writing about this small local campaign again. The truth is that the levers of power are far away from any of the participants. Even Humphrey Cobbold doesn’t actually own most of his company- that would be CCMP Capital Advisors ,a US private equity firm. LA Fitness is also mostly owned by US private equity firm MidOcean. (Proud boast on their website- ” no one will ever out-work or out-hustle us for business”.)
The Kentish Town campaign brought people together. It created a burning sense of unfairness among residents and it did clarify a few things:
companies that exist primarily to pay shareholders and top executives have little interest in their local or community obligations.
fear of losing clients no longer exists.(cf mobile phone companies/banks/insurance companies)
companies are increasingly inward looking towards market movement rather than outward looking to us.
assets now means having the capacity to strip rather than to build upon.
But there was one human sentiment expressed by LA Fitness in all this. The campaigners agreed to meet for one final swim on Xmas Eve. But LA Fitness closed the premises a day early-” in light of the open unrest of the members”.
For sheer offensiveness to long standing clients this could hardly be bettered.
Thank you Lyndsay for your summary of the local community versus LA Fitness / Pure Gym confrontation.
As a non member I have not been involved, but as a local have followed the unfolding story with interest, applauding from the side lines at this demo of local democracy in action.
The ensuing ‘instructive failure’, as you describe it, sounds depressingly familiar.
How satisfying to fantasise a communal pool-cum-sauna-cum-gym rising phoenix-like from the ashes of this failed venture, complete with utopian indoor garden, a place to chat or be silent and relax in beautiful surroundings, a healthy cafe, and and and……perhaps a Kentish Town take on the Roman baths. Does it take an emperor?
It is a good moral tale, and very nicely told. But as one of the principal organisers of the campaign, I don’t feel the fight has been ‘comprehensively lost”. Why not? Because I believe that Pure Gym’s name is now very much changed. It is darkened and tarnished through wider public understanding of the destructiveness of the firm’s actions (the knowing acquisition of 30 gym/pool combinations when it knew it would eliminate all these pools). Which makes the company certainly not ‘pure’ (though perhaps it never was). Plus the point made well here that the model for their expansion is based on ‘stripping’ out the asset of an established membership base. Now more exposed.
Any Google search can take you to the BBC’s You and Yours (and to Joan Bakewell’s critique) or to Tessa Jowell’s reference in the Evening Standard to Pure Gym’s ‘betrayal’ of the Olympic Legacy, or a little check on Twitter will take you to Duncan Goodhew’s fierce criticism of what he has termed the ‘largest single act of vandalism against swimming’. These comments will not go away.
Any good campaign would work hard to find high profile supporters. And I am really grateful for their help and commitment. But what this campaign has also done is bring together a wonderfully disparate set of pool users – some into regular, passionate campaign meetings, others in conversation and commentary – from the taxi driving pool users of mid afternoons, to the early morning gaggle in the steam room, to the fantastic aqua-aerobics class, to any of us, like me, with dodgy knees or ageing bits of body (or mind) needing something quite different from machines and weights to give us nurture and health.
The campaign has enhanced such a community. And the Asset of Community Value status may have no regulatory or planning power, but it very properly recognises why an understanding of community should matter to a good business (and arguably to any business that wants to stay the course). In the end many of us may want to argue for good business as part and parcel of good community – and in an increasingly de-regulated world, we may have to do that through our own voices rather than having institutions of local or central government to help.
I do agree – but my point is that I don’t think that all the energy and commitment that LA Fitness clients have shown in trying to save the facilities that they have paid for over the years, cut any ice with corporate financial owners. i think we’re in a new ball game now. The kind of publicity tht Pure Gym and LA Fitness have received would have had companies 20 years ago heading for the best PR firms in teh business- and they might have changed their ways too!- but I think these absent corporations are very difficult to influence at a human or community level.
But your last point- that we have to be more self reliant in a de-regulated world- is bang on.
Thanks for all comments
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