Rathbone Boxing Club: the new fight club for boxing purists opens its doors

You wouldn’t think it to look at its box-fresh interior, Fitzrovia postcode, or the L:a Bruket handwash in the bathrooms (RRP: £18.95), but Rathbone Boxing Club owes its origins to a “spit-and-sawdust” gym in a “non-sexy” part of downtown New York, where four-time world heavyweight champion Evander Holyfield spent his formative training.

“It’s a real boxing gym,” says Manya Klempner, Rathbone’s co-founder. “On the street there’s steam coming out. You walk down the steps and the brick is painted white, but it’s all peeling. I go in and expect it to be, ‘What are you doing here, little girl?’ And they couldn’t have been nicer to me. It still gives me chills.”

Those chills led to a light-bulb moment, which led to hard cash from a raft of investors and to Rathbone Boxing Club, which opens its doors for business today. The idea, says Klempner, is to take the DNA of spit-and-sawdust gyms — the community, the training pedigree — and add the luxury trappings of the London studio fitness scene.

It’s bang on trend. In the past few years London has been talking — and talking some more — about fight club. Data from fitness booking app Class Pass confirms that boxing is one of its fastest growing workouts: the total number of classes available on the platform grew by 49 per cent in 2018, with cardio boxing growing by 34 per cent and kickboxing by 23 per cent.

The capital has dedicated studios — including Kobox and BXR — and dedicated classes at high-end gyms (Gymbox, for example, offers seven boxing classes). Disciples are zealous, and no wonder: besides being a turbocharged workout that guzzles calories, boxing delivers sculpted shoulders, lithe biceps and a steely core. But Rathbone’s USP in this crowded market comes back to that non-sexy NYC boxing gym, with its peeling walls and its steaming vents. Here — like there — it’s all about the teaching.

The gym’s star trainer is Adam Booth, the Brit who has trained top-flight boxers David Haye, Andy Lee and Ryan Burnett to world championship titles. Classes focus meticulously on the constituent elements that make a boxer float like a butterfly and sting like a bee: agility, footwork, technique. One class, pitched at advanced boxers, titled Anatomy of a Fight, involves viewing a bout between two greats, projected onto the wall of the studio, in order to learn how to box like a champion. The idea is not to think about sessions as a workout but as coaching: basically, like you’re an amateur sportsman.

“It’s not just ‘put your gloves on, hit the bag, feel sweaty, go home’,” confirms Greg White, the club’s co-founder and head coach. “It’s making sure technique is right. In the classes I’ll break down a specific style — Mike Tyson’s peekaboo, the elusiveness of Mayweather, or Tyson Fury.” He’ll do his best to right wrongs, too. “A lot of people come into a boxing gym having done a boxercise class. So they’ll have picked up bad habits already. We’ll break you down like a boxer would be by their club.”

The buzzwords here are not calories, but strength, power and — time and again — authenticity. Besides a vast boxing ring with red and blue corners (I am dying to get in), there are weighted tyres, medicine balls and ab wheels. There are punchbags — a mixture of angled bags, long bags and aquabags — as well as speed balls and skipping ropes: equipment a pro would use. But it’s also undeniably luxe enough to appeal to London’s fiterati: there are waterfall showers, chic white sinks and Instagram-friendly mantras on the wall (“You can throw in the towel or you can use it to wipe the sweat off your face.”) There’s also merch including catwalk-friendly boxing boots and T-shirts. After an intro offer of £30 for three classes, it’s £20 a class. Still, it’s got some real character. Maybe it’s the stylish vintage posters — Muhammad Ali features heavily — or the functional benches but this feels like a real fight club.

Klempner and White want Rathbone to have a community feel. There’s also going to be what Klempner calls a charitable arm: an amateur boxing club for young people in the community, with cheaper off-peak sessions and a view to creating a Rathbone Amateur Boxing Club squad: “We think it’s a really good symbiosis.”