There was a time when a sauna was something you did alone and in silence. A small wooden box at the back of the gym, next to the showers. You sat on the top bench in a damp towel, avoided everyone’s eye and left after ten minutes.

Nobody would have called it a night out.

That has changed, and quickly. All over the country, saunas have moved out of the gym basement and into the middle of people’s social lives. They are on rooftops and beaches, beside lidos and under railway arches. And the people in them are talking.

A new kind of evening

The modern sauna is built for company. The rooms are large, with tiered benches that seat dozens. There are cold plunges alongside, because half the pleasure is the shock of the cold after the heat and the slow walk back. And there is nearly always somewhere to sit afterwards, wrapped in a towel with a cup of tea, feeling pleasantly emptied out.

That last part is the point. You can’t take a phone into a sauna. There is nothing to look at but each other. Nobody is drinking. You are warm, slightly dazed and in no hurry, and it turns out those are very good conditions for a conversation.

For a generation going out less and drinking less, it has become a real alternative to the pub. It is somewhere to go on a Friday night, or a first date, or a Sunday morning with a friend you haven’t seen for a month.

Where it began

None of this is new. It is very old, and it comes from Finland.

So does the word. Sauna is Finnish, and people there have been building them since the Stone Age. Today a country of 5.5 million people has around 3.3 million saunas, which is more than one for every two Finns.

For most of that history the sauna sat at the centre of family life. It was where you washed and where you rested, and traditionally it was where babies were born. Finns have long thought of it as a “church of nature”, a place to clean the mind as much as the body. In 2020 UNESCO added Finnish sauna culture to its list of the world’s intangible cultural heritage.

What stands out is how ordinary it has always been. In Finland the sauna was never a luxury or a treatment. It was simply part of the week, shared with family, friends and neighbours.

The Romans understood something similar. Their public baths were places to meet as much as places to wash.

So what looks like a new trend is really a return. Even in Finland, the old public saunas in the cities had almost vanished by the middle of the last century, and new ones are now being built. The rest of us are simply catching up.

An evening, not a treatment

The best of the new saunas have understood that they are in the business of an evening, not a treatment.

Some sessions are guided. A host leads a small group through the heat and the cold, sometimes with breathwork, sometimes with music or sound. Others are left open, so you can drift between hot and cold at your own pace. Some places have gone further and put a DJ in the corner at the weekend, which tells you everything about where the sauna now sits in people’s diaries.

You can’t take a phone into a sauna. There is nothing to look at but each other.

They are opening in cities and on coastlines faster than anyone can list them, most of them independent, each with its own character.

Why now

Part of it is practical. We are short of places to be together that don’t involve a screen or a drink. The sauna is one of the few: an hour of doing nothing, in company.

And part of it is simpler than that. It feels good, it is easy to say yes to and you leave in a better mood than you arrived. Not many nights out can promise that.

So the next time a friend suggests meeting for a drink, suggest a sauna.

Two to try

Fix, Manchester. Beneath the street in the Northern Quarter, Fix describes itself as the city’s first dedicated contrast therapy studio. A cedar sauna with Himalayan salt brick walls, two deep ice baths and a lounge for herbal tea afterwards. Guided and open sessions.

Arc, London. In Canary Wharf, Arc is built around a communal sauna for up to 65 people, with ice baths and a lounge. Guided sessions through the week, and evening sessions with live DJs at weekends.