The social side of the bathhouse: bathing was always public

Most of what is sold as bathing today is a solo session of sixty minutes, with a booking slot, headphones in, and sauna and ice in sequence. The format works well, but it is a recent invention and, in the history of bathing, an exception.

For thousands of years the bathhouse was a public address with opening hours and regulars. People went to get clean and stayed because that was where everyone was; the heat was the stated reason, and the room was what brought them back.

This piece is about that part: what the hot room does to conversation, what the research supports (and what it does not), and which design decisions settle whether your bathhouse will have talk in it or the silence of a waiting room.

Bathing was social infrastructure before it was wellness

In Rome, bathing was a daily, cheap habit. The fourth-century regional catalogues list eleven thermae and roughly 850 balnea in the city, and entry cost a quadrans, the smallest bronze coin in circulation. The great imperial thermae had, besides the hot rooms, an exercise yard, gardens, a library and shops. This was urban equipment, like a square or a market. The mechanics of the building are in Roman baths: how the thermae actually worked.

The pattern repeats far from Rome, with different equipment and the same function.

In Finland, Rajaportti, in Pispala, Tampere, is described on its own site as the oldest public sauna still operating in the country. It opened in 1906, is still wood-fired, has separate men’s and women’s sides and shares its building with a coffee house and a masseur. Since 1989 the neighborhood sauna association has run it. In December 2020 UNESCO inscribed sauna culture in Finland on the intangible cultural heritage list. The nomination cites some 3.3 million saunas for 5.5 million people, and close to 90% of the population bathing at least once a week.

Rajaportti, in Pispala, Tampere, opened in 1906 and still in operation. Photograph: Visa580, CC BY 2.5, via Wikimedia Commons.

In each tradition, company is built into the format, almost always in a physical detail:

Tradition	What makes the format social
Japanese sentō	A neighborhood bath, minutes from home, used on the way back from work
Russian banya	The venik, the bundle of branches, needs a second person to be used
Hammam	The scrub is done by someone else, on the central heated stone
Korean jjimjilbang	The same uniform for everyone, a mixed common floor, food and a place to sleep
Finnish neighborhood sauna	Café, changing room and yard in the same building, on a weekly habit
Roman thermae	Exercise yard, gardens and shops attached to the bathing rooms

None of them runs on a booking slot and a sixty-minute exit.

When bathing became a thing you do alone

The Japanese case is the best documented. According to figures from the national federation of public bathhouse businesses, compiled by Tokyo Shoko Research, Japan had 17,999 sentō in 1968. In 2022 there were 1,865, the 53rd consecutive year of decline. A drop of 89.6% in a little over half a century.

The decline is usually attributed to the housing boom of the late 1960s, which put a tub inside the apartment. Bathing did not end; it moved off the street and into the home, where there is nobody to run into.

In the past few years bathing has come back out of the house, but in another format: a one-hour slot, a contrast protocol, a booking app and a measurable result, where what is sold is the heat and the ice, and the room comes second. The difference between a bathhouse and a contrast studio is in Bathhouse, spa, recovery and hot springs.

The contrast studio is a different format, sold by the slot and by the person, and it sits outside this guide, which covers bathing together in a shared room. Anyone who confuses the two on paper ends up building one and promising the other.

In London, the sauna as a third place

In London, the return of communal bathing sits next to what survives of the old one. Lucie Grace, in Britain’s Best Saunas (Hoxton Mini Press, 2026), gathers eleven addresses in the city’s chapter: from municipal baths still in use, such as the Porchester and Ironmonger Row Baths, to the Russian banya, the Finnish Church sauna and clubs opened in the last few years. She recalls that the columnist Caitlin Moran called saunas “the new pubs” in The Times in 2018, and reads the phrase as the sauna taking the role of a third place: somewhere away from home and work to meet people.

Many of the city’s new saunas sell timed sessions, like the studios, but the room is large and shared. Community Sauna Baths occupies a 1930s public baths building in Hackney Wick and lists on its own site free sessions for people referred through the NHS, Britain’s public health service. Sauna Social Club, Grace writes, puts on nights with DJs and local artists under a railway arch. The owners she spoke to give the same reason again and again: fighting loneliness and building ties in the neighbourhood.

What heat does to conversation

The hot room produces a specific kind of company, for six reasons, all of them physical:

1. The phone does not come in. Heat and humidity ruin the device, and almost every bathhouse bans cameras because people are undressed, which leaves the room without screens.
2. The clothes come off, and status goes with them. Without shoes, a watch or a lanyard, the quick read of who is who gets much harder.
3. The benches sit side by side. Talking while looking ahead costs less than talking face to face.
4. The cycle forces a pause. Nobody stays in the heat for two hours straight, and the conversation happens in the break: in the rest area, in the yard, in the line for the shower.
5. The discomfort is shared. Getting into cold water at the same time as a stranger gives you an immediate subject, with no shared language needed.
6. There is time left over. A two or three hour visit has dead space by definition, and dead space is where conversation fits.

None of this is automatic, and silence is a legitimate choice too: the German Ruheraum is a declared quiet room, and Japanese onsen etiquette asks for low voices. A house can be talkative or quiet, but the design is what settles it, and whoever does not decide ends up with an ambiguous room where half the people think they may speak.

What the research shows, and what it does not

It helps to separate two bodies of literature that are often cited together.

The first measures heat: the Finnish cohort studies track sauna frequency and duration against health outcomes without recording whether the person went alone or in company, so they say nothing about company.

The second measures social connection, and it has a broad base. The meta-analysis by Holt-Lunstad, Smith and Layton published in PLoS Medicine in 2010 pooled 148 studies and 308,849 participants and found a 50% greater likelihood of survival among people with stronger social relationships, an effect on the order of well-established risk factors. In June 2025 the World Health Organization published the report of its commission on social connection, which estimates one in six people worldwide experiencing loneliness and links isolation and loneliness to roughly 871,000 deaths a year.

As far as we know, there is no study comparing bathing in company with bathing alone and producing a number. What does exist is a format that delivers heat and a public room at the same time, and evidence, in the studies above, that social connection weighs on health.

The design settles whether people talk

For anyone drawing a space, company depends less on a sign asking people to speak to each other than on decisions about plan, program and price list, nearly all of them taken before construction.

Decision	What isolates	What connects
What you sell	A 60 minute slot per person	Entry with an open-ended stay
Area split	Rest area smaller than the heat area	Rest area equal or larger
Hot room bench	Rows facing the stove	A continuous L or U bench
Temperature	100 °C dry, which silences the room	75 °C to 85 °C with steam, which lets people stay
Program	Free circuit all the time	One timed ritual that gathers the house in one room
Food	None	Coffee, tea or a simple kitchen with a table
Zones	An implied rule of silence	A quiet room and a talking room, signposted
Circulation	Changing room with a door straight to the street	A route that passes through the lounge
Price	Expensive drop-in only	A membership or a pass, which creates frequency

The right-hand column costs money, and it belongs in the budget as investment. A large rest area is square meters that neither heat nor filter anything and still need finishing, and it is where the visit stretches out and conversation happens. The cost ranges per square meter are in How much it costs to build a bathhouse.

How to go alone and not be alone

For the visitor, the arithmetic is simpler. Six practical rules:

1. Going alone is common. A good share of the people in a bathhouse arrived on their own, and that is not a situation to be fixed.
2. Ask at the desk which rooms are quiet rooms. Many houses have the rule without writing it on the door.
3. Do not start a conversation in the hot room with someone whose eyes are closed. The rest area, the yard and the line for the shower are where people talk.
4. Repeat the time slot. A bathhouse works like a neighborhood gym: the tie comes from showing up on Tuesday night three weeks running, more than from one perfect visit.
5. Bring someone on the second visit, and not the first. On the first you are still working out where things are.
6. Leave the phone in the locker, because it undoes the five items above.

Next step: open the map and look for a space near you with a lounge, or read Bathhouse, spa, recovery and hot springs to know which format you are booking before you pay.