BodyWorksWest

In heart of Notting Hill, this is suitably flash. If you want looks, it’s OK. If you want expert help and encouragement with fitness, go elsewhere. Looks shiny and well equipped, but as other comments show, comes with bad customer service. Staff and managers don’t know about health and physical fitness. Management offer (often costly) special sessions (say, nutrition) without delivering basics of good classes and gym sessions.
Staff work on charm to recruit new members, who get shock of big let down on promises of high standards and ‘club’ ambitions. It all looks nicer than facilities like Virgin, and is warmer and whiter than public facilities, but the training, hygiene and safety are quite bad in comparison.
Range of classes, in nice light studio, but not many in evenings.
Some good classes (Daniel, Alison) show up poor standard generally, and management has no expertise, couldn’t care less, and employ some indifferent class teachers.
Trainers in the gym chat to each other, ignoring members and don’t help unless paid extra for personal training sessions. Good equipment, again let down by lack of engagement and poor attitude.
Cool changing rooms. Good looking pool, 18 metres, and steam room. Members grumble a lot about cleanliness and safety.
Expensive extras such as Pilates reformer.
Not very Internet friendly booking, so have to book spinning classes just one hour before class and in person not online — useless for people who work or have busy lives.
Owners seem obsessed by image, so standards suffer.
If you want something like Shoreditch House etc, why not join it, then save your cash and use a chain gym where staff care about standards not showing off.

The nicest gym in the area. Could do with more free weights though

The gym is nice and clean and projects a very chic attitude. The monthly training session and selection of classes is very good. While I also like the TVs on each piece or cardio equipment, none of it can overcome the lack of free weight and hammer strength machine. They just didn’t have enough space to build a worthy gym just a chic one.
Having said that, it is close to where I live and generally meets my needs. I will lift heavier elsewhere.

This is my gym and I don’t know what I would do if I lived further away than I do. It’s owned and run by a New Yorker who wants it to be a full-​service gym with all the bells and whistles. The gym itself has about 10 treadmills, 8 ellipticals, 5 cycles, 2 rowing machines, 3 power plates and all the weights and equipment one could want. If you’re there off-​peak then you basically have the place to yourself! Every member has free monthly training sessions, but the trainers don’t do much in the way of helping you out when you’re on their own — they are either too busy chatting with each other or giving privates. Being from New York, I expect attention from trainers even if I am not in a session, but I guess they just do things differently here. I recommend Fabio for men, Simon for everyone and the new girl (Kia?) for women.
The classes are great and I think Daniel is one of the best reformer pilates around. The steam room, sauna, pool and hot tub get me motivated to actually get to the gym, and Beauty Works West, next door, offers a whole range of spa treatments.
The lobby downstairs is always very nice with internet connection, daily newspapers, tea, coffee, a TV and magazines. My criticisms are mainly due to the workers, in particular Thea or something similar who works on accounts and signed me up. Never in my life has someone working in the service industry — let alone a luxury health spa/​gym — been so incredibly rude and demeaning. I have thought about writing directly to the owner to voice my complaints, but maybe via avenues like this people will get the message. She has a serious attitude problem and every time there has been an error with our account (yes, more than once!) we have been blamed and scolded (!) I think she needs to get out of client services pronto, but anyhow, avoid her and your experience there can be care free and lovely!

Convenient gym for people who live around Westbourne Grove/​Ledbury Street. Great for classes, very nice 18m swimming pool. Spinning room, pilates reformer, and yoga studios.
But the main gym/​weight room is weak. The equipment is not in great shape: the touchscreens on the treadmills don’t work properly and the ergometers are slack, among other things. But the biggest problem is weights. Far too little in way of free weights and dumbells, making it difficult to get a proper heavy weight workout in. The men’s locker room could use a renovation, or at least better cleanings.
The ‘club’ attempt is cutesy but it’s not worth joining for that. The classes and one-​on-​one training are the best elements of the gym, as well as its convenience.

This gym/​club wants to be sort of like Shoreditch House — at least that’s what one of the managers told me when I recently took a tour of this little gym in Notting Hill. They’ve just come under different owners, and the new proprietors are aiming to capture a bigger share of the luxury consumer pie by trying harder to position themselves in that cachet of exclusivity and cool — limiting the total members to somewhere around 1700. I’d say they have a bit of work to do.
Much like Shoreditch House (and maybe this is where they got the idea that they had a chance of being its pseudo-​version in the first place) Body Works West has a beautiful pool… clear sparkling water of a gentle chlorine colour, surrounded by calming neutral tones and blues; the pool is so serene, just looking at it makes the thought of a relaxing swim a very compelling idea (I had to hold myself back from jumping in fully clothed — and I’m not even that big into swimming).
Another nice thing about BWW is that they have a good number of power plates — those vibrating platforms that are supposed to boost your metabolism by 50% just by doing some light exercise and stretches atop them — it’s a nice extra detail that hasn’t hit mainstream gyms just yet, and especially nice if you’ve wanted to try one.
The gym, however, is very small… which isn’t necessarily a bad thing, but I guess I do tend to like more roominess and anonymity in my gyms. The classrooms looked especially tiny — definitely not the sort where you can hide in the back. And I absolutely hated their elliptical machine setup– a single row of machines perched high up on sort of a makeshift balcony overlooking the weight/​stretching area — the people working out up there looked awkward, and I can imagine why… who wants to be so prominently on display while panting away? In case it catches your fancy, however, you should know that there are DVD players attached to the machines — so that you can sweat away to whatever comedy or action film will make your workout less painless.
The manager who gave us our tour (sorry sister to the other manager, Thea, I forget your name…) was a bit strange… ice-​cold and uncomfortable to be with — maybe it’s because we didn’t fit into her image of the new cool customers they are looking for… but still, it certainly tainted my image of the place — if I were rating the gym just based on my encounter with her, it would get 1 star. Seriously, I couldn’t wait for our ‘tour’ to be over so that hard stare and furrowed brow would stop. Thankfully, the rest of the staff that we interacted with were very courteous and nice.
While there are some true destination gyms out there with too-​rad classes and fantastic fringe benefits, I think gym membership decisions unusually come down to the convenience factor — so if Body Works West is close to you — it certainly has the requisite weights, classes, machines, etc. most gym rats are looking for — so nothing should stop you from joining. But if you don’t live nearby… no matter how prestigious this place wants to be, it certainly doesn’t offer anything that would make a person want to put in any extra effort to be a member.