The British high street has had a difficult decade. Department stores have closed, fashion chains have downsized, and the vacancy rate on London parades has remained elevated through most of the post-2020 period. The tenants stepping into the gaps are no longer the brands the high street was built around. They are nail bars, vape shops, coffee chains, and, increasingly, clinical wellness operators signing long leases on units that used to belong to clothing retailers and high-street banks.
Spa & Massage, a London-based chain of massage therapy clinics, is one of the most visible names in that last category. The company has opened three of its six London clinics in the past 12 months alone, and has publicly committed to a target of 25 locations before it considers stepping outside the capital.
What landlords are actually buying
Wellness operators of this kind sit awkwardly in property classification. They are not retail in any conventional sense. They are not medical clinics either. To a landlord they look closer to a category sometimes labelled experience-economy or service-led retail, and they share a property profile that has become unusually valuable on the post-pandemic high street.
Operators at this scale tend to take longer leases than the fashion and food-and-beverage tenants currently turning over those parades. Many service-led tenants draw footfall in evening and weekend hours that have weakened for traditional retail. And the service itself cannot be delivered through an app or shipped from a warehouse, which means the demand is durable in a way the retailers these units used to hold are no longer.
For a council planning team trying to bring footfall back to a half-empty parade, a six-clinic chain with a twenty-five-unit growth plan is a substantially more attractive prospect than many of the alternatives in the same tenant categories.
The interior is part of the property argument
What separates Spa & Massage from the lower-end occupiers of similar units is how the rooms themselves are built. A high-street unit that pulls in walk-in traffic only works if the interior justifies the price the chain charges. The clinics have been built to feel closer to an Asian spa than a UK physiotherapy room, which separates the brand from the more clinical end of the market and supports a price point above the basement studios but below the hotel spas.
Aly-Khan Thobani, the founder, has framed the design intent plainly. “We have built our clinics to a very high standard. We wanted our clinics to have a spa feel, rather than feel like a cold and unwelcoming medical clinic. We have taken the best qualities from eastern spas and have integrated into a high-end modern clinic,” he says.
The combination is what makes the property argument work. The chain is asking a landlord to take a long view on a tenant that delivers what is, technically, a manual therapy service through a hospitality-grade interior at a retail-accessible price point. Very few existing tenant categories carry all three of those characteristics at once.
What the rollout would mean
Spa & Massage has been operating since 2007 and reports approximately 150,000 active clients, with roughly 1,500 massages performed each week. That sustained throughput across six clinics is the basis on which the 25-clinic target is being pitched. Reaching it would put a Spa & Massage clinic within walking distance of most central and inner London postcodes.
A property pattern worth watching
If wellness operators of this scale continue to take long leases on shopfronts that retail has vacated, the composition of the British high street starts to look materially different. Less fashion and household goods, more services that people physically have to be present for. Spa & Massage is not the only chain following this pattern, but the size of its current footprint and the speed of its opening schedule make it one of the most visible examples in London. How quickly the rest of the high-street tenant mix follows is the question the London property market is now testing. The chain’s locations and treatment list are at Spa & Massage.
