The 10 best saunas in the UK

The flagship of Britain's community-sauna movement — seven wood-fired saunas in a converted Hackney Wick bathhouse, non-profit, sessions from £8.50, and heat that doesn't compromise.

Scotland's most complete day out: a Loch Tay spa pairing a wood-fired sauna and steam room with a heated pool and a cold plunge fed from the loch — plus HotBoat, the country's first floating sauna, out front.

An Australian-style bathhouse in Walthamstow with two big Finnish saunas — one social, one silent — and three ice baths stepped at 10, 7 and 5°C for easing into the cold.

Scotland's first mobile wood-fired sauna, usually above the tombolo at St Ninian's Beach in Shetland — about as far north as the ritual goes in Britain, with the North Atlantic for the plunge.

Home to the UK's largest standalone sauna — western red cedar with Himalayan salt-brick walls — beneath Manchester's Northern Quarter, run as guided contrast therapy with breathwork and sound.

Two Siberian cedar barrels on Edinburgh's Granton waterfront — Big Bear seats eighteen — both facing the Firth of Forth with direct sea access between rounds.

A wood-fired beach sauna on Bude's Crooklets Beach with a panoramic window over the Atlantic and the sand a step away, from £12 a session — the Cornish coast at its most direct.

A wood-fired sauna on Sandbanks Beach with a sea-view window and direct beach access for a Channel dip — the south coast's polished take on the beach barrel.

A clifftop pair above Canty Bay — one wood-fired, one electric — with a plunge pool and a coffeehouse next door. Thirty minutes from Edinburgh, but it feels properly remote.

An industrial Russian banya in a Hoxton warehouse with a fierce parílka and the venik birch-branch treatment as the real draw — plus a restaurant that takes the food as seriously as the heat.