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Update: Last Friday (19 January) the Finnish sauna was officially awarded a ‘listed’ certificate by English Heritage. The building is now a Grade II listed building.
Have you heard of the 1948 Austerity Olympics? London, still reeling from the effects of war, decided to welcome athletes from around the world for a back-to-basics, simplified Olympic Games.
Although no new sports facilities were built, a Finnish company donated a simple new sauna to the temporary Olympic village. After the Olympics, the sauna was housed in a prefabricated wooden hut and transported to Maidstone, Kent. Today, it is one of the last buildings left from the austerity Olympics, and the oldest sauna in Britain still in use – and is at the centre of a new heritage campaign.
Members of the Cobdown Sauna Club used the space for decades until it was subject to a safety inspection in 2020. Inspectors found faulty electrical circuits and a broken stove, but members didn’t have the money to fix them. The club has applied to be listed by English Heritage, hoping to secure funding to revive the historic sauna.
The event was hosted by Finland’s ambassador to the UK, Jukka Siukosaari. Siukosaari told the Guardian that preserving the sauna was important “not only because of its unique architecture, but also because of its historical roots in Finnish-British relations and its significance to our shared sporting history.”
Richard Young, the sauna’s secretary and treasurer, told reporters: “It’s more than just a sauna, it’s a club. If you go to a leisure centre it’s noisy and there’s a mixed crowd, but we’re all friends and we miss that sense of company. It’s very relaxed, very raw, very real and very different.”
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