Our purpose
Creating active places for healthy people
Our services
Creating active places and healthy people for communities to thrive
We are one of the UK's leading social enterprises, welcoming over 30 million members to our 78 health and wellbeing facilities across the nation annually.
We aim to enlighten our communities about the benefits of a healthy lifestyle in collaboration with local authorities, customers, partners and within our thriving community hubs.
By understanding the needs of the community we aim to create behavioral changes which improve the physical and mental wellbeing of individuals and social wellbeing of the collective.
Our facilities
Our vibrant and attractive spaces encourage communities to play sport, socialise and engage in physical activity. Across the country our provide the following spaces for the community;
- 65 swimming facilities
- 77 gyms
- 74 group workout spaces
- 26 squash courts
- 57 sports halls
- We even have libraries, banks, GP surgeries and pottery courses operating from our sites!
Our facilities are about more than just health and fitness. By welcoming clubs, charities and societies to exploit the space available they can become the beating heart of our community.
Our social value
We love nothing more than seeing the impact that our people, facilities, and communities have on our visitors. From guiding a child through their first strokes in the water to offering a Place where goals are established, safe spaces are offered and health in every form is promoted. We offer tangible rewards.
As a social enterprise, we also provide social value for the communities we serve. Using the Moving Communites Social Value Calculator, which assess the local impact on health, education, subjective wellbeing and crime, Places Leisure generated an estimated £131m of social value in 2022.
See the breakdown of the impact we made at the link below.
Helping our communities
All that we do is done to have an impact on the communities that we serve. Across our 80+ facilities our teams have worked alongside their communities to create impact in a variety of ways.
Read about just some of projects launched within our centres below.
Inclusivity in recruitment
Warm hubs
Accessibility
As community hubs, our centres need to be welcoming to all visitors, some with more specific needs than others.
That is why we are constantly looking at ways to make our leisure centres more accessible, and improving the way we signpost those with additional mobility or other needs.
We've teamed up with AccessAble to produce a number of audits for our sites, providing in depth information to those that need it most, including information about access, additional facilities and other accessibility features.
For those with additional needs, each of our centres' home pages displays the accessibility features available. If you feel you may assistance outside what is listed, our friendly team will do all they can to help you.
Sustainability
At Places Leisure we are fully aware of our responsibility to ensure the environmental impact of centres is minimised. By their very nature, leisure centres consume large amounts of energy and omit significant carbon emissions.
Our strategy delivers fantastic community-led activities in the most environmentally responsible way.
Our commitment to reducing energy consumption and improving our green credentials through thoughtful design has already contributed to around 20% in energy savings and reduced CO2 emissions by 11000 tonnes. We are determined to do more and have set ourselves an ambitious target to work with our local authority partners to drive towards a net zero target by 2035.
Examples of how we will seek to achieve this can be seen in some recent projects we have completed.
Example 1
Example 2
Design and build
Over the last 12 years we have designed and constructed 17 new state-of-the-art leisure facilities. We work closely alongside a dedicated project team of architects, project managers, construction companies and subcontractors to offer local authorities ‘One Complete Solution’ and help bring their vision for the site to life.
Take a look at some of our latest facilities.
Our partners
We work closely with a range of partners from national governing bodies, sporting partners and community partners to deliver a service that we can be proud of and that meets the needs of our communities.
Our communities are based all around the country. Currently, Places Leisure works with 34 local authorities, helping to create active places for communities to thrive.
Latest news
Find out about all that is happening around our centres and in our community.