I think I might have to stop getting massages at general-purpose spas. When I want a relaxing afternoon with a friend I'll just do the cheap thing and get a spa pass without a treatment, or get a facial or a wrap. I'll save my massage money for someone who can actually do a proper job (ie Jutika or Flora).
My old friend Zoe was visiting from Dahn Sahf last week and, Lastminute having sold out of its special offers at Titanic, we decided to stay closer to home and get something in Manchester. The £40 per person offer for a massage and spa at Nu Spa in the Park Inn hotel (a scarily modern shiny black monstrosity round the back of Victoria Station) looked like a good bet.
Hmmm. Very odd massage indeed. No pressure, no depth, no finding a knot and kneading it out. Just 50 minutes of vaguely pleasant but slightly frustrating and ultimately slightly pointless stroking. The leg and arm bits were ok, but if anything the back massage, ie the most useful/necessary bit for most of us, was worse than nothing, because my therapist went nowhere near my shoulder muscles at all, concentrating instead on the surface of my back. This meant that at the end my back was sort of a bit relaxed, but by contrast my shoulders just felt even more tense. It almost felt like the sort of massage various clueless boyfriends used to dole out on a night when you've got a headache and they're hoping that a bit of back massage might make it go away enough for them to get laid...
Zoe also noted that they used one of the massage balms that seem to be becoming popular at many mainstream spas at the moment, and commented that you don't get that feeling that your skin is being nourished that comes with a good-quality massage oil. Zo is used to getting extremely good massages off a friend of hers who is a professional herbalist and all-round alternative treatment type, and like me, she found this one pleasant enough but slightly pointless.
The spa facilities here, however, are quite nice, despite the dire grammar on the website. I'd certainly pay the kind of rates that Sienna at the Radisson charge (£12) to spend a day lounging by the rather elegant pool and using the sauna and steam room. The one drawback here is that, oddly, the two showers in the pool area are both hot, so you can't do the sauna/cold shower routine which is the whole point... doh. The showers in the changing room were a bit weird as well, with a scarily clingy internal shower curtain that gave poor Zo a right fit of a heebie jeebies. But there was a pleasingly large collection of trashy mags by the loungers :-)
A closing recommendation is for one of Manchester's best-kept secrets, the (fairly recently launched) afternoon teas served between 2 and 3.30 in the Sculpture Hall cafe, just to your right inside the main doors of the Town Hall on Albert Square. Proper, served-on-a-three-tier-stand, finger sandwiches, scones, jam and fancy cakes style cream teas. £8.95 for more than even the two of, eating as a late lunch and utterly ravenous, could put away. Superb.
Massage and spa day, £80 for two people, Nu Spa at the Park Inn, 4 Cheetham Hill Road. Tel: 0161 837 8377, email: Pace.Manchester@rezidorparkinn.com
Tuesday, 27 July 2010
Monday, 26 July 2010
Country hotel spas
It seems like the latest trend in new spas – now that every shiny identikit urban hotel has shoehorned one into the basement – is small country hotels gluing on an extension or remodeling a back room to fit in at minimum a therapy room, and in some cases a fuller range of spa facilities. So while the two main spa choices (and marketing angles) were 1) shopping/partying city-break with the girls (a la MacDonald Hotels) or 2) stately home isolation (a la Thoresby Hall), there is now a third – elegant, upgraded hotels in rural destinations where, for example, you can go walking and then wind down with a massage, or one partner can go and do scary things on mountain bikes while the other gets wrapped in mud or seaweed. This seems like a positive development; presumably it creates/preserves local jobs, provides good options for people who might otherwise take gas-guzzling short flights abroad (unless of course they're the really evil types who take internal UK flights), and encourages visitors in the British rural economy to spend money locally. All Good.
The highest-profile example of this trend in the North seems to be Verbena Spa at the Feversham Arms in the insanely cute Yorkshire village of Helmsley. The news that started me writing this post was a press release (complete with horrible punctuation errors) about the Swan, a converted seventeenth-century alehouse in Newby Bridge, on tip of Lake Windermere. You can tell the release was written for and probably by southerners – it doesn't mention the name of the village at all, just the Lake. Ho hum. But the hotel – where I'm pretty sure I've stopped for a brew, years ago, and which seems to have benefited from a major facelift – looks lovely and well-suited for short breaks, especially since (unlike Helmsley) it would be easy to do by public transport from Manchester. Some of these places say 'spa' when they mean treatment rooms offering massages, facials, wraps etc, but the Swan does have a gym, pool, sauna and steam room too. Not quite competition for Verbena's full battery of 'monsoon showers', ice room, juice bar and saunarium, but probably enough for a relaxing weekend away. I'm sure I had one of those, once upon a time...
The highest-profile example of this trend in the North seems to be Verbena Spa at the Feversham Arms in the insanely cute Yorkshire village of Helmsley. The news that started me writing this post was a press release (complete with horrible punctuation errors) about the Swan, a converted seventeenth-century alehouse in Newby Bridge, on tip of Lake Windermere. You can tell the release was written for and probably by southerners – it doesn't mention the name of the village at all, just the Lake. Ho hum. But the hotel – where I'm pretty sure I've stopped for a brew, years ago, and which seems to have benefited from a major facelift – looks lovely and well-suited for short breaks, especially since (unlike Helmsley) it would be easy to do by public transport from Manchester. Some of these places say 'spa' when they mean treatment rooms offering massages, facials, wraps etc, but the Swan does have a gym, pool, sauna and steam room too. Not quite competition for Verbena's full battery of 'monsoon showers', ice room, juice bar and saunarium, but probably enough for a relaxing weekend away. I'm sure I had one of those, once upon a time...
Thursday, 8 July 2010
Victoria Baths - spa of the past and future
A couple of months ago, I was commissioned to copywrite a series of case studies for Togetherworks, a social enterprise network for Greater Manchester. One of my subjects was Victoria Baths, the spectacular partly-restored Grade II listed Edwardian public baths on the edge of Longsight. Manchester residents may remember the building from the BBC's Restoration programme, presented by Griff Rhys Jones, which Victoria Baths won in 2003, giving a huge boost to both its public profile and the fund-raising campaign.
The best-known parts of the Baths are the three swimming pools (one of them now covered over to form a sports hall), with their glass roofs and original, seaside-blue changing stalls. But more exciting to me, and more pertinent to this blog, is that fact that the old Turkish Baths, with their glorious coloured tilework, have now been largely restored, and may even be the first part of the building to be brought back into public use. As well as the various hot and cold rooms of the Turkish baths, with their long tiled and wooden benches for relaxing on, there are also a pair of 'Aerotones,' the first public jacuzzis installed in the UK (in 1952). They look to me more like my Grandad's old twin-tub washing machine and not something I'd want to climb into for pleasurable purposes, but they're not likely to be on offer in a hurry.
After years of fund-raising and wading through the bureaucracy of restoring a listed building, the Victoria Baths Trust, which is licensed to look after the Baths on behalf of the owners, Manchester City Council, is only now in a real position to think about how to make the facilities available to the public. According to Mike Franks of the Victoria Baths Trust, they're hoping to find a similarly environmentally- and socially-minded organisation, perhaps a not-for-profit, to run the operation for them. Fingers crossed the find one soon. In the meantime, anyone interested in the building and its history can join a range of tours and open days.
As part of the case studies, Dave Gee, a marvellous Manchester photographer, took a range of photos of the Baths. Here are some of the thumbnails:
The best-known parts of the Baths are the three swimming pools (one of them now covered over to form a sports hall), with their glass roofs and original, seaside-blue changing stalls. But more exciting to me, and more pertinent to this blog, is that fact that the old Turkish Baths, with their glorious coloured tilework, have now been largely restored, and may even be the first part of the building to be brought back into public use. As well as the various hot and cold rooms of the Turkish baths, with their long tiled and wooden benches for relaxing on, there are also a pair of 'Aerotones,' the first public jacuzzis installed in the UK (in 1952). They look to me more like my Grandad's old twin-tub washing machine and not something I'd want to climb into for pleasurable purposes, but they're not likely to be on offer in a hurry.
After years of fund-raising and wading through the bureaucracy of restoring a listed building, the Victoria Baths Trust, which is licensed to look after the Baths on behalf of the owners, Manchester City Council, is only now in a real position to think about how to make the facilities available to the public. According to Mike Franks of the Victoria Baths Trust, they're hoping to find a similarly environmentally- and socially-minded organisation, perhaps a not-for-profit, to run the operation for them. Fingers crossed the find one soon. In the meantime, anyone interested in the building and its history can join a range of tours and open days.
As part of the case studies, Dave Gee, a marvellous Manchester photographer, took a range of photos of the Baths. Here are some of the thumbnails:
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