Why Britons still aren't ready for ‘social nudity'

Telegraph

19-07-2025

As a Briton, I feel I have much in common with my Scandinavian cousins: an endurance of long, cold, grey winters; a love of thrillers; a passion for wild swimming and saunas. In the course of researching two books on sauna culture, I've spent years sweating it out around Estonian lakes, and in hotboxes on windswept Norwegian archipelagos. Generally, when enjoying these activities I've been wearing a swimsuit – and this is where any similarities to our Nordic neighbours end.
For in these bathing nations, nudity is a given, and it has been for generations; a deep, clean sweat is a naked one. Why wear an unhygienic swimsuit which prevents your skin from breathing and lessens the sensory experience, when you can go without? Why indeed.
I can think of many reasons. Shame, embarrassment, legacy of a Catholic schooling, scar tissue from unwanted sexual advances, the male gaze, unachievable images of female perfection.
Through my work, on research trips around Northern European cultures where nude bathing is the norm, I have had to confront my body issues; I have been in situations where being the only swim-suited one feels out of place. I have had to dig deep not to be the stereotypical British prude. I've been told to remove my sarong in a 200-person naked sauna event in the Netherlands, and come a cropper in a smoke sauna in southern Estonia where no-one ever wears clothes.
Slowly, I've relaxed a little, shed the layers and come to appreciate that being naked in the company of others – and in a safe setting – can be freeing and healthy. It's just taken me a while to catch up with those enlightened bathers in Scandinavia, Germany, the Baltics and beyond.
And I'm not alone. According to an Ipsos poll, 6.75 million Brits people claim to be naturists, up from 3.7 million in 2011. The survey stretches that definition from being naked in a private hot tub to being an all-out naturist, but slowly, it seems we are unbuttoning, unravelling the threads of convention. When it comes to public nudity, the burgeoning numbers of wild swimmers and sauna bathers are driving the trend, which appeals to all ages – and is largely being led by women. In the Outdoor Swimmer 2025 trend report, of 2,500 swimmers surveyed, 59 per cent of women reported wild or cold-water swimming weekly or more, compared with 37 per cent of men. More than half of those aged 25 to 34 started swimming after the pandemic. In these novel settings, we seem more likely to relax long-held social conventions.
'It starts with accidentally forgetting the dry robe, or the underwear,' says one of my wild swimming pals. 'Then there's the faff and fuss of carting all the swim clobber to the water and back. It's so much quicker and easier to travel light, to keep the changing kit to a minimum at the risk of exposing a nipple, or a pale goose-bumped buttock to the elements. Over time, you just don't care any more, and nor does anyone else.'
Ella Foote, the editor of The Outdoor Swimmer magazine, offers guided wild swims to groups. 'If I have a same sex group, I'll sometimes suggest a skinny dip at the end. They all look at me with wide eyes, and it only takes one and then they all strip off and go in. Swimming naked is a natural transition to being at one with nature. And because you're submerged, it feels safer; it's a good space to play at nudity. People tell me all the time that their relationship with their body has improved.'
Sauna culture is playing into it too, as quirky horseboxes, pop-up tents and cosy barrel saunas provide places to sweat on beaches, lakes and rivers everywhere from Crieff to Cardiff. In the nine months I spent travelling around the country, researching these new hotspots and sharing the bench with athletes and recovering addicts, builders, barristers, mums and teens and pensioners, I came up close to the complex relationship the British have with our own – and other peoples' – bodies. I met bathers who wear wetsuits, leggings and sweatshirts in the sauna – anything rather than nothing – and I've been to 'clothing optional' sessions where everyone is naked. Often these are started by the community and evolve organically.
Take Quays Swim in Surrey, a 50-acre swimming lake with two saunas near Mytchett. More than 75 per cent of its visitors are female and the venue hosts two ladies-only naked swims for Breast Cancer Now. After stripping off for these dips, a group of women set up a naked sauna. 'I don't know what it is about clothes, but when you discard them, you're discarding a whole load of other issues as well,' says one participant, who got into cold swimming after the death of her husband. When she first bared all, she found it 'liberating, as though the swimsuit was holding everything in. All that pent-up emotion was set free, and that's what I love.'
Beach Box Spa Brighton runs a 'clothing-optional' session hosted by German sauna master Mika Valentini, 34. 'Everyone comes for themselves; they're not looking at others, and it's understood that nudity doesn't mean a certain outcome. They feel relief about exposing their bodies, which builds body confidence.' The event is carefully screened off, and there's always someone supervising.
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Valentini grew up in Munich where on a hot summer's day the city's swimming lake is packed with naked bodies.'I have a healthy view of my body as I became accustomed to nudity from a young age and it's not linked to sex,' he says, adding that in Germany there is also an attitude of, 'It's my body. This is my natural self and how I want to be.'
Not everybody in Britain is relaxed about the gradual arrival of social nudity to our shores. Cut to Corton Beach in Lowestoft, Suffolk where this spring the parish council came under fire for trying to ban naturists from its famously beautiful sands. It was forced to remove signage banning ' lewd behaviour ' to the dismay of disgruntled locals who had complained of sexual activity in the dunes.
Public nudity is not illegal in England and Wales but the laws around it are open to interpretation; under the Sexual Offences Act 2003 unless a naked person has the intention of 'causing alarm and distress' it is not a crime to wander around naked anywhere. But one person's distress is another person's freedom. 'There was a time when the legislation was clear,' says Andrew Welch, the national spokesman for British Naturism (BN), a non-profit group with around 8,500 members which organises naked events around the UK. 'If you were going to strip off, you had to go to a designated beach. Now you can go anywhere.'
Earlier this month, nude-fearing locals will have had to endure thousands of bathers taking part in The Great British Skinny Dip, organised by BN. For many, it will have been their first 'dare to bare' experience and more than 60 venues participated. Among them was Whitmore Lakes near Stoke-on-Trent where male and female wild swimmers dipped in a small private lake. That event was led by Whitmore Lakes' operations manager Lauren Pakeman, 31. 'People here are wild swimmers and understand the health benefits and they want to strip back and go to the next level, really feel the elements.'
Harry Beardsley, the commercial director of PortaSauna, provides tent saunas to locations across the UK. 'Clothing optional events are definitely more spoken about in public now,' he says. 'People seem to be becoming more accepting of nudity. Many of them are familiar with sauna cultures in other countries where it's weird to be in swimwear. But our society is not really built for it,' he cautions.
'Public naked events need to be handled very sensitively so that both participants and the general public are protected. It will take time and practice. Where's the line? We have to prepare for the worst as we are so behind the times.'
Fast forward a week, and Beardsley's cautionary words were in my ears. In the name of research and in what, for me, was an epic act of bravery, I attended a naked swim organised in association with British Naturism at a leisure centre in East London. The group included five women and 23 men of mixed ages and a naturist couple in their 70s.
The atmosphere was strange; naturists are not the new wave sauna folk I am used to meeting, and I couldn't orient myself. Was there a sexual undertone? Being so heavily outnumbered by men, I felt squeamish and suspicious. Some attendees said, when I asked them, that they were there that evening because they love swimming naked.
Others were clearly enjoying the sociable atmosphere; nudity can break down barriers and almost everyone but me appeared comfortable. But my gut feeling proved a trusted ally when one young man turned to me and said: 'You're the journalist, right? I'm finding all these tits and vaginas overwhelming.' I later spotted him touching himself inappropriately and reported him to the organiser of the evening. I vowed never to return to a naturist event and left, my intuition muttering with a 'told-you-so' righteousness.
The next day I received an email from the BN organiser: 'I was absolutely gutted when you told me about the incident which occurred,' it read. 'It was absolutely against the mood, intention and guidelines of our event [..] We don't need this kind of bad apple to lower the tone of our sessions. The night was fantastic, our busiest so far, and I'm pretty angry that his actions have cast a shadow over the event.'
The culprit was banned and the code of conduct was made more visible on the event webpage, but what about me? An apology can't undo the impact the incident had on me. I am seasoned in both nudity and crude male commentary, but how would a younger, more sensitive female have felt after such an episode? There are reasons, tested over millennia, why, in almost all sweat bathing nations, men and women bathe separately.
But, in this country, won't 'bad apples' always be drawn to public events where people are naked? I quiz Welch at British Naturism. His response is not robust: 'I'm sorry that you've experienced this in practice, but I think it [lewd behaviour] is more of a perceived barrier than a real one. The number of times people have to be told to behave or to leave a place is a lot fewer than you would imagine.'
Suspicious of BN's approach to safeguarding, I call Barry Sykes, the artist in residence at the British Sauna Society, who has also had experience with BN events; we have often shared the sauna bench together. We discuss how there can be a naïve, clubby idealism among naturists, something Sykes says he also noticed when he was commissioned to develop an art project at the naturist community Oakwood Sun Club near Romford in Essex.
'As a white middle-aged man, I was in the majority there, so maybe less likely to feel vulnerable, but I often wonder whether the committed naturists have been doing it for so long, and it feels so unquestionably comfortable for them, that they can struggle to empathise with what it's like for newcomers,' he says.
'I always found going to Oakwood a welcoming, cathartic experience that took me outside of normal behaviour. Organised naturism has been a fringe aspect of British culture for nearly 100 years and I find its absurdity fascinating, but it still takes a great deal of thought and care to host people safely and ensure everyone feels relaxed but respectful.'
Some of the new generation of sauna owners have similarly idealistic dreams of bringing authentic, naked sauna culture to our shores. But the results so far are mixed. Katie Bracher, 43, is a co-founder of the British Sauna Society and the director of Wild Spa Wowo in Sussex, a cluster of saunas and cold plunges set in woodlands. 'When I launched a weekly naked session, I had hoped to move British bathing culture forward. I'm not a naturist but when you get used to having a naked sauna, it's so much nicer, and I wanted people to experience that, in nature, at ease with their bodies.'
It started well, she says, with a relaxed festival vibe, until some nearby campers complained about seeing naked people. Then the split between sexes shifted. 'It evolved from being the same number of men and women, to being mainly men at which point the women started covering themselves. In the end, it became too complex,' says Bracher.
Charlie Duckworth, a co-founder of Community Sauna Bath which runs sites all over London, came to a similar realisation. 'I like being naked in the sauna and I started out wanting to create an authentic Finnish experience but after we had a couple incidents, I gave up trying to move the needle on it.'
When did it come to this? Why are naked events in this country so fraught with jeopardy? Surely our Stone Age ancestors sweating in communal saunas in Orkney would have been naked? The Romans bathed in the nude too, and the first Victorian Turkish baths offered single sex sessions where most bathers were naked. Malcolm Shifrin, the author of Victorian Turkish Baths, says: 'There were differing views, but overall casual nudity in the Victorian Turkish bath was more or less the norm during the second part of the 19th century.' But beyond the bathhouse, modesty was also the norm. Clothing became tied to morality which blended with shame. Is our Victorian moral code still deeply engrained? Valentini thinks so: 'Brits never want to offend and I think the belief is that the body is private and shouldn't be displayed.'
Towards the end of the 20th century, there was a creeping change, not from public bath operators but from bathers of other religions and couples swimming together in costumes. But the real death knell of naked bathing was the take-over of local authority-run Turkish and swimming baths by private enterprises. 'The brief of the local authority was to provide a community service, which private companies could not afford to do,' says Shifrin: 'If new bath operators had led the way by providing happier, healthier facilities, a majority would have followed them, ensuring that some provision was made for those who prefer costumes. Germany, it seems, has it absolutely spot-on.'
So too the Scandinavians. In 1432, Venetian nobleman Pietro Querini, shipwrecked near the island of Røst in northern Norway, wrote, 'The inhabitants of these islands are very pure living people [..] their customs are so simple they do not bother to lock up their belongings […] In the same rooms where the men and their wives and daughters slept, we also slept, and in our presence, they undressed naked when going to bed. They used to take a badstue (sauna) every Thursday and they would undress at home and walk a bowshot (around 450 metres) naked to the badstue and bathe together men and women.' Should this sea-faring Venetian have washed up on, say, the Isle of Wight, his observations would have taken a different tone.
Given that we need SAS-level training on how to behave together naked (Rule Number One: Look people in the eye, and only in the eye), is it simpler to separate men and women, as they do in Finland, Japan and other evolved bathing nations? I ask the Surrey women, who treasure their weekly naked sauna, if they would ever welcome men? No, they cry emphatically. 'We would not do this with men because you get tension where you feel self-conscious and all of that,' says one. Another adds: 'It's boring, and it just changes everything. If it went mixed, I wouldn't come any more.'
Carry-On style spectacles such as the World Naked Bike Ride inevitably attract coverage. (Our ancestors would surely have donned a practical loincloth before jumping onto the saddle of a bike had such a thing existed.) British Naturism get-togethers such as Nudefest – a naked festival in Somerset, and events such as naked pottery classes, dining and pétanque – do little more than provide nudge-nudge entertainment for outsiders. And as I discovered, going to an unclothed event with naturists can be like diving into the deep end before you have learnt to swim.
Perhaps this new wave of nudity chimes better with the naturists of the 1920s and 1930s, those doctors, psychoanalysts, avant-gardists and health lovers who advocated nakedness as a non-sexual route to a fit, sun-kissed, healthy body. Eager to ditch stuffy Victorian attitudes, they too looked to Europe for inspiration. Annebella Pollen, the author of Nudism in a Cold Climate and a professor of visual and material culture at the University of Brighton, points out some major evolutions: 'The 1930s naturists believed in a cult of beauty; it was not an inclusive movement. Today, in the age of social media, we make conscious efforts to celebrate bodily imperfections.'
TikTok trends such as 'Naked Moms', in which young women talk about how seeing their mothers naked as they were growing up helps with body positivity, and a focus on how our relationship with our bodies negatively affects our mental health have shifted the narrative. 'There are new agreements and understandings especially among the young who are careful about how they're seen and who's looking,' says Pollen. 'The dominance of older men among nudists may be off-putting to younger women.'
Can we change and mature? More education and boundaries are surely needed and it won't happen quickly. 'Promoting the benefits is only half the job,' says Sykes. 'People need to know what is expected of them. But we have so much anxiety about our bodies and it can be undone. Exposure changes attitudes.' Perhaps it's a gentle, gradual journey, a series of small reveals, before we can ever come to see that in the end, a body is just a body.