Harpenden Leisure Centre - Harpenden

mark C.

This is an awful Gym, i signed up to the You + membership so i get 2 free passes for family and friends. This is a con, you cannot bring the same person twice to the Gym.
If you have a small group of friends the passes are useless. When signing up i was thinking of my wife, be nice twice a month to go together. Its a joke of a policy a year membership and my wife could only come once.
Another issue is the gym is not very clean, pretty nasty really. The showers are not clean i spotted the same dirt on two different days in the showers.
Also to many kids in the gym upstairs after 5.30 when they should be gone.
Just a really bad run Gym...Please avoid at all cost...
Not worth the money

tommy C.

The opening hours are poor as the gym closes at 6pm on Saturdays and Sundays. The gym is often full to capacity during peak times and the health suite closes as early as 2pm on Sundays (for no real reason!). The cleanliness, in particular in the toilets, leaves a lot to be desired. Overall, not good value for the £43 monthly membership fee.

Steve P.

I attended Harpenden Leisure centre today with my brother and nephew, get some exercise after xmas! We are not members as do not live local but visiting my elderly father. On arrival we we told we could not swim as non members unless we register online before hand. What is the world coming too that we have to register to swim at a pool we would use very rarely!!!
How on earth is anyone who may not be computer literate able to use these community services!!

MW4508

A very undesirable place to workout.

Prices recently rose from £34.99 to £42.99 for the standard adult gym-access membership. For this, you get nothing extra in services.

The gym is chaotic, mostly filled with groups of teenagers who flock there. You simply can not work out after 5pm, the place is rammed full. There is not enough equipment and no traffic/crowd management. It doesn’t help this is the only gym in the area.

If you do manage to squeeze in, the general demeanour of the ‘everyday Harpenden gym-goer’ is very unhygienic and lacking in general gym etiquette. Plates and weights thrown about, machines ‘reserved’, people holding conversations around equipment when they should be working out or moving aside so someone else can use the equipment, etc.

The staff are also incredibly unwelcoming. I’ve never been to a gym where I walk past reception without a friendly ‘hello’ or ‘good morning’ being reciprocated. Here, the best I get is blanked or an eye roll.

This is the only EA I’ve ever worked out in, and it’s an absolute disaster. Council run, and it shows. It’s little more than a school-gym, and given the clientele it also caters to teenagers too.

Avoid like the plague. Get some weights and workout, uninterrupted or un-intimidated, at home. I did, 6 months ago, and I’ve not looked back.

Lucy H.

Moved to Harpenden a year and half ago and I have been a member since then, if there was any other gym available in Harpenden I would go to it because this one is poor.

The class quality is rubbish. Yoga, pilates, body pump in particular. The classes seem to only cater to much much older people who are not looking to be challenged by exercise.

There is one spin class that is worth going to at 6pm on a Monday but the screens have been broken for months so you are only able to track progress by using an app. The centre used to have virtual spin classes but as the screens do not work this can no longer happen. There is Fortis available but it is nearly impossible to secure a place - presumably because members recognise that these classes are the only ones worth going to. The timings of them are also incredibly inconvenient for normal working hours.

The centre is frequently full of teenagers messing around on the equipment with no regulation. The staff do not intervene when they are riding on the machines, the staff are also rude and don't seem to care about the issues - when the water fountains break for example

There is also no reliable WIFI - so if you have your work out on an app or you want to use the Pelotons - you can't!

The machines are find but since they've doubled the price in the year I moved here that's pretty much bare minimum

Apparently the centre is no longer council owned so this is EA not putting any effort into the gym - it's a shame because I have been a member of other centres which were great. This one is just a bad experience.

Abhijith

Great facilities, friendly staff and good location. Only complaint is about the parking machines inside the facility. One or both are not working most of the time. The machine are dead slow, takes ages to respond, and will test your patience.

S D.

Management need to intervene with some of their staff. Exceptionally rude girl on the front desk, very unhelpful and to be honest would make me want to never enter the gym again. Whoever is in charge, please do better.

AJ C.

Play badminton here regularly. Good to have so many courts. However, the floor in there is absolutely filthy, with caked on mud and other dirt. Clearly not cleaned at all, let alone regularly.
No ventilation in the courts, or in the gents changing room, with quite a pathetic mirror too.
Parking always a nightmare.