'Cold water swims changed my life, now I hope to help others with Cold Water Plunge in Harrogate'

There was a time when Guy Coates dreaded Mondays. The 33-year-old, from Harrogate, had followed his older brothers to university and eventually found himself working in the fast-paced, corporate world of management consulting in London. On paper, it was a good career. In reality, he was unhappy and unfulfilled.

“I thought it was going to set me up to have a really happy, successful life, but when I got down to London, I realised that I really hated the work and I didn’t like the lifestyle,” says Guy. The working week became a grind, and he found himself living for the weekends, which revolved around drinking and partying. He felt trapped. “I didn’t know what to do,” he says.

Guy sought therapy and professional support, but he also knew he needed to change his routine. He moved out of his flat and in with his brother near Hampstead Heath. Then he discovered the lido. He had read about cold-water therapy and started swimming before work. Soon he was doing it every morning, even through the winter, following the swim with time in the sauna before heading into the office. “It doesn’t get any easier going in,” he says. “But I started getting really hooked on the cold water and the euphoria that you got after that, and how long it lasted for the rest of the day.”

Something changed. He felt clearer, more energetic and more confident, and his mental health improved. The morning swims became part of a different way of living, one that eventually helped him decide that the life he had built in London was not the life he wanted. And so he came home.

The idea of building somewhere that combined cold water and sauna had already begun to take shape in his mind. Back in Harrogate, it started to feel like a possibility. “With Harrogate’s history as a spa town, I didn’t feel like there was enough - we weren’t really shouting about it.”

In January last year, Guy met the landowner at Birk Crag, a setting with its own links to the town’s bathing history. The site had been at the top of his list, and the project finally began to take shape. Guy has built much of it himself, using reclaimed materials sourced from across the country, with help from a joiner on some of the larger jobs. There is a wood-fired sauna, changing rooms, showers and lockers, alongside three plunge tubs and a fire pit outside.

For Guy, the bigger ambition is to create somewhere people can come together. He wants to run community sessions and offer free sessions for NHS staff, local charities and people who might otherwise struggle to afford them. It is a long way from the London office where he once sat. Now, instead of heading into the city each morning, he will be welcoming people into the woods - and hoping some of them leave feeling a little better than when they arrived.

“If someone stopped me in town and said, ‘I felt really rubbish before I came to Cold Bath Plunge, but I left and got it out of my head for the day’, that would give me such a different sense of fulfilment,” he says. “That means way more to you than any salary ever could.”