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About us

We’re dedicated to building healthier communities

The Jubilee Hall Trust is a charity that aims to build strong healthy communities by promoting the fitness and wellbeing of the individuals within them.

The Trust operates four health, fitness and sports centres in Covent Garden, Hampstead, Southwark and Westminster and also manages outreach community programmes such as dance classes for older people and healthy eating education programmes for obese children.

Jubilee Hall Trust is committed to building healthy communities and subsidises most of our charitable work through the income generated from selling memberships. As our community programmes now extend to include free classes for seniors, free GP referral Schemes and free membership for certain community groups we now find ourselves having to raise additional income through grants and fundraising.

Where we’ve come from

The Jubilee Hall was built in 1897 as part of London’s fruit and vegetable market. When the market left Covent Garden in 1974, local people campaigned to save Jubilee Hall to use as a low-cost community-based recreation facility. 

After operating Jubilee Hall successfully for 14 years, The Armoury, an old Victorian Drill Hall in Hampstead, was taken on as a second club in 1992. The Armoury is now a thriving health and fitness club and remains at the forefront of development of our GP Referral and Cardiac Rehabilitation Programmes.

In 1999, after a highly competitive tender process, we were awarded the prestigious management contract of the Westminster Gym in the House of Commons. The profits generated are used to underpin the community projects of the Trust. Such has been our success, that our contract has been renewed several times and 100% of members at Westminster now rate our staff as Good or Excellent!

In 2000 The Colombo Centre, joined in partnership with Jubilee Hall Trust to develop a fourth club, serving the community in Southwark.  The Colombo Centre now features 2 artificial turf football pitches as well as 2 tennis courts, which are offered free of charge to the local community after 7.30pm on weekdays and all day at weekends!

In January 2010, the gym at Colombo was refurbished and re-launched as a ’budget gym’ offering membership for less than £20 per month. Since then, membership has increased five times over and more than a third of gym members are from some of the least affluent local communities.

Our work

We are involved across London in many projects aimed to help people get fit and healthy.

For example:

School Partnerships: We work directly with local primary schools in Camden and Westminster to inspire children to adopt a healthy, active lifestyle from an early age.

Projects have included:

  • wearable technology to track and motivate “active moves” throughout the school day
  • sport coaches at lunchtime and after school for activities the children voted on
  • training to upskill teachers on making the school day more active
  • free summer camps and after school clubs in partnership with Camden Active Spaces

We know that active children need active adult role models, so we provide free fitness classes for parents and staff at our partner schools as well.

Community Projects within the gyms: We offer a number of free and low-cost activities at our gyms to make fitness accessible for the groups that will benefit the most. This includes fitness and dance classes for seniors; exercise classes for women and girls; community Soccer Tots, youth football, netball and tennis programmes and hosting a range of fitness and weight management classes in partnership with local councils and community groups.

Active Events: We recognise that the gym is not for everyone, so we try to encourage people to move, be fit and have fun wherever they are most comfortable. Projects include the Big Dance Buscharity running, and outdoor gym projects. We also participate in large scale campaigns like Sport Relief and National Fitness Day to provide motivation and opportunity to be more active.

Concessionary Membership: We try to make fitness accessible to everyone by financial financial burdens where possible.  More than 23% of our total memberships across our four gyms are concession – for students, elderly, disabled people, unemployed or juniors.

GP Referral Programmes: At our clubs in Hampstead and Westminster we run successful schemes where people referred by their doctor can receive free one-to-one supervised exercise sessions to help treat specific medical conditions.

Cardiac Rehabilitation Programme: At The Armoury in Hampstead and Colombo Centre in Southwark we host Phase IV cardiac rehabilitation programmes run in conjunction with local hospitals.