Gym of the Month: Urban Kings

Urban Kings is unlike any kickboxing or MMA gym you’ve ever been in. Located in Kings Cross, the heart of central London, the gym sits among some of the most expensive real estate in the world.

The facilities reflect that: there’s no thinning old mats here, no dripping tap for a shower. Everything is top of the range, high-end. Urban Kings is owned by Pierre Andurand, prodigious hedge-fund investor and owner of the GLORY World Series kickboxing league. He’s built the kind of gym he wants to train in.

Urban Kings is like the Tardis phone booth from Doctor Who. From the outside it seems small but once you go inside and down into the underground training area, you find yourself in one of the best-equipped gyms in the capital.

Weights equipment, matted floors and walls, a full-size boxing ring, a half-cage and a private training room are all packed into this central London space. On top of that, gym patrons can also find kettle bells, monkey bars, climbing ropes, cable machines, a VersaClimber and an Olympic Lifting Area.

No wonder that the gym is popular with high-level fighters who visit the UK. The former UFC middleweight champion Anderson ‘Spider’ Silva used Urban Kings to host training sessions while he was on a seminar tour in the UK ahead of his second fight with current champion Chris Weidman.

Rico Verhoeven, the GLORY world heavyweight champion, has also trained at Urban Kings while in the UK, as has the late Muay Thai legend Ramon ‘The Diamond’ Dekkers, who conducted one of his last-ever seminars there. Staff from GLORY’s London office, including members of the board of directors, also consider Urban Kings their home gym.

“We offer a range of classes. In the location we are in we get a lot of corporate clients, training in Muay Thai, MMA, Brazilian Jiu Jitsu. Some of our guys fight at amateur level, our trainers fight at professional level,” says Gyp Tessier, head coach.

“For most of our members it’s only a recreational thing or a self-defense thing. Some of them are really good though, they could fight if they want to. You get trained to a high standard here.”

“The gym is open from seven in the morning until nine at night, which makes it idea for training before or after the working day.

“In addition to the core curriculum of combat sports - Muay Thai, Brazilian Jiu Jitsu and MMA - the gym also offers yoga and pilates, both of which are very popular with fighters and athletes because of the flexibility and posture benefits they bring.”

Born on the island of Ibiza, Tessier left home at 15 and went to stay with family in Paris. There he discovered Muay Thai and it wasn’t long before he left for Thailand, where he spent ten years training and competing.

From Thailand he moved to New York to pursue his twin loves of acting and fighting. He trained at The Wat with Phil Nurse - Muay Thai trainer to UFC champion Georges St Pierre - for several years before returning to Europe to teach the skills he had learned to the new generation of fighters.

Gyp Tessier heads the Muay Thai and kickboxing side of Urban Kings while BJJ black belt Jude Samuel heads the groundwork. Alongside them they have the likes of Ashleigh Grimshaw, one of the UK’s top talents, and the Lumpini Stadium veteran Josh Palmer.

Tessier says that the gym has around 500 members on the books, approaching the upper limit which management put in place to ensure that the gym does not suffer from overcrowding. Membership is split quite equally between male and female and the age of clients using the facility ranges from 18 to 60.

“Most gyms are kind of rough around the edges, or if you train in Thailand you get like a few heavy bags and a tin roof, that’s about it, but Pierre had this vision of taking that training and placing it in a more upmarket environment for an urbane clientele who live and work in the area,” says Tessier.

“They expect a high standard from their facilities and they get it: designer changing rooms, sauna, chill-out area, juice bar and a bespoke audio system which was specifically tailored for the gym’s dimensions.

“Nice facilities, changing rooms, music, a place you can hang a suit…. But we still retain the good, hard training. There is no soft training here.”

Find the Urban Kings Gym at 4 Bravingtons Walk, Regents Quarter Courtyard, Kings Cross N1 9GA (the entrance to Regents Quarter courtyard is next to the Nandos restaurant on York Way).