Corporate Yoga in the City of London

Working here

The Square Mile keeps its own hours. Trading desks are live before most of London has had breakfast, and the working day for lawyers, insurers and bankers alike tends to run long after everyone else has gone home. It's an environment built around markets, deadlines and billable hours, not spare time — so a session has to fit into the gaps rather than ask anyone to make one.

In practice that usually means early mornings, before the desks fill up, or a lunchtime slot timed around the quieter stretch once the initial rush of calls has passed. A boardroom with the chairs pushed back works fine, and so does a meeting room booked out under an unassuming name in the diary. People often arrive still half in work mode — phone in hand, tie still on — and it takes a few minutes for that to properly drop before the session starts.

What tends to stick in the City is consistency: the same slot, the same week, the same small group, so it becomes part of the working week rather than a one-off. Regulars get used to seeing the same teacher, which matters in an industry where so much else changes — teams reshuffle, deals close, people move on. The routine is often the point as much as the stretching.