Aerial Fitness Studio in Bankside: £60 for Three Classes

Flying Fantastic sells new customers three aerial classes for £60, which works out at £20 a session, and the cheapest place to use them is Arch 27, 229 Union Street, SE1 0LR, a railway arch about four minutes on foot from Southwark station on the Jubilee line. Husband and wife Chris and Edel Wigan opened the school in 2011 because, in their words, London needed a proper home for aerial fitness. The Bankside arch is one of two studios; the other sits in Peckham, and the intro pack works at both.

The class list is wider than most people expect from an aerial fitness studio. Silks and aerial hoop are the headline disciplines, but the timetable also carries static trapeze, slings, straps, rope, aerial yoga, a conditioning and flexibility strand, and accessible aerial sessions. That spread matters for a beginner, because the intro triple can be split across three apparatus. A sensible order is hoop first, since you start low and seated, then slings, then silks once your grip has had a week to adapt.

Silks is the class that tends to humble people. Climbing fabric uses the forearms, the lats and the core at the same time, and the first lesson usually spends more time on foot locks and a basic climb than on anything photogenic. Hoop rewards the patient differently: you learn to mount from a hang, sit in the base of the steel ring, and hold shapes like the mermaid while the hoop turns slowly. Trapeze sits in between, with a fixed bar that makes balance easier to read.

Outside the £60 intro deal, the price page lists a single class pass at £35 with six weeks to use it, a four-class pack at £110, which is £27.50 a class, and an eight-class pack at £200, or £25 a class, both valid for eight weeks. Conditioning and wellbeing classes are priced separately: £20 for one, or £70 for four, which brings the cost down to £17.50. If you only want stretch and strength work to support your aerial training, that cheaper strand is the efficient buy.

Read the cancellation line before you book a run of Tuesdays. Flying Fantastic keeps a 24-hour cancellation policy that it states it cannot waive, it does not refund classes you booked and could not attend, and it will not extend the validity of a pack. Our honest take: skip the £35 single pass if you are brand new. The intro triple costs less than two singles, and three sessions is roughly where the school says most people manage a move they did not think they could do.

The FAQ is specific about clothing because fabric burns are real. Cover your arms, your knees and your midriff; avoid loose tops that ride up when you invert; and pick cotton over Lycra for silks, since slippery fabric fights the grip you are trying to build. Take off rings and watches, tie long hair back, and leave anything with zips at home, because zips damage the equipment. Classes are done barefoot or in ballet flats, so trainers stay in the changing area.

Regular weekly classes are for anyone aged 16 and over, and the school says there are no weight restrictions on the equipment, with bungee the one class that posts limits. Younger flyers have their own track: Young Flyers runs at Union Street on Thursday afternoons from 4:15pm and in two Saturday morning slots starting 9:15am and 10:45am, with Teen Flyers alongside. On a Saturday you will often share the arch corridor with parents waiting for those classes to finish.

The adult rooms draw a mix that reflects the postcode: people walking over from offices around Blackfriars and London Bridge for an evening class, dancers keeping their conditioning up between contracts, and complete beginners who saw a silks routine at a show and wanted to try it. Nobody expects flexibility on day one. The new-to-aerial page puts it bluntly: you do not need to be strong, flexible or fit to walk in.

Southwark station is the closest stop to Union Street, with Borough on the Northern line and London Bridge both a short walk east. Street parking around the arch is limited, and the school itself recommends public transport. If you would rather drive, use the Peckham studio instead: it is at Unit 1B, 1 Bellenden Road, SE15 5BA, inside the Lidl car park, where the first 90 minutes are free and number-plate cameras issue fines after that. Peckham Rye station is about five minutes away on foot.

Both studios have changing facilities, so you can arrive in work clothes and change on site. Book through the online timetable on flyingfantastic.co.uk, where you can filter by studio and discipline. Arrive with ten minutes to spare on your first visit so the instructor can ask about injuries before the warm-up starts.

Union Street makes it easy to build an evening around a class. Walk east along it and you reach Flat Iron Square, a cluster of food stalls and bars under the railway viaducts, and a few minutes beyond that is Borough Market, where the permanent traders sell bread, cheese and hot food through the day. Eating a big lunch from the market right before inverting on silks is a mistake you only make once, so save the toasted cheese sandwich for afterwards.

Heading north instead, Southwark Street leads you to Bankside and the river. Tate Modern's turbine hall is free to walk through, and the Thames path from there to Shakespeare's Globe takes ten unhurried minutes. That route also passes the Millennium Bridge, which is the quickest way across to St Paul's if you are heading home towards the City after an evening session.

If you want a long, structured programme rather than drop-in style classes, the school has run four-week Absolute Beginner Courses on Saturdays covering mounting, dismounting, basic poses and short sequences; when a new block is scheduled it sits on the same online timetable as the weekly classes. If you are aiming at circus-school training with performance in mind, the National Centre for Circus Arts on Coronet Street in Hoxton runs adult evening courses in a converted power station. For a first taste of aerial fitness close to the river, though, the Bankside arch is hard to beat.