Bannatyne Brand Guidelines: A 1997 Teesside Health Club, LivingWell & 67 Clubs

A founder’s surname over the door.

Bannatyne is a British group of health clubs, spas and hotels run from Darlington, in the north-east of England. Its founder is Duncan Bannatyne, a Scottish businessman who, by his own account on the company website, started out in Stockton-on-Tees with an ice cream van, then built a care-home business, Quality Care Homes, and a children’s nursery chain, Just Learning, before turning to health clubs. From 2005 to 2015 he was one of the investors on the BBC programme Dragons’ Den, English Wikipedia says, which made his surname familiar well beyond the region where the chain began.

The company behind the clubs is a little older than its first club. Companies House records Bannatyne Fitness Limited as incorporated in December 1996 under the name Bannatyne Health and Leisure Ltd, a name it kept until November 1999; its registered office is in Darlington, and its listed business is fitness facilities. English Wikipedia dates the chain to 1997, when the first club was built at Ingleby Barwick, on Teesside. The Independent, writing in August 2006, said the chain had been born about ten years earlier with a first club on Teesside, and that Duncan Bannatyne had used the proceeds from selling Quality Care Homes to set it up.

The name on the door has shifted over the years. The Independent called the chain Bannatyne Fitness in 2006; today it trades simply as Bannatyne, and its website presents the health clubs, spas and hotels together under the Bannatyne Group name. Teesside Live, in April 2026, described the group as Teesside-based and named Duncan Bannatyne as its founder and executive chairman, so the founder is still at the head of the business that carries his name.

LivingWell, spas and hotels.

The chain’s biggest single step came in August 2006, when it bought the LivingWell health club chain from Hilton Hotels Corporation. The Independent reported on 9 August 2006 that the deal covered 24 stand-alone clubs around the UK, but not the health clubs inside Hilton hotels, and that Bannatyne had outbid LA Fitness. It said the purchase took the chain to 61 clubs, making it, in the paper’s words, the fifth-largest gym chain in the country, with a combined membership of about 180,000. English Wikipedia and the company’s own website give the number of clubs bought as 26. The paper said the LivingWell clubs would be rebranded as Bannatyne Fitness and refitted, with new café and bar areas. The company website says the purchase made it the largest independent chain of health clubs in the United Kingdom; that is the company’s own description.

The Independent placed the deal in a busy period for British club chains: Fitness First had changed hands about a year earlier, and the property firm London & Regional had bought Next Generation, the racquets club business run by the former tennis player David Lloyd. Further purchases followed for Bannatyne. English Wikipedia records that the company bought Clarice House and Xpect Leisure in 2015.

Spas became a second business. The company website says Duncan Bannatyne opened the Bannatyne Spa Hotel in Hastings in October 2008 and revamped the spa chain at the same time, and the spas now run in partnership with the skincare brand Elemis, according to the site. The group’s three hotels are in Darlington, Durham and Hastings.

The estate has also been reshaped. Teesside Live reported in April 2026, from the group’s 2025 results, that Bannatyne ran 70 sites: 67 health clubs, 45 spas and three hotels, five of them in the north-east — Ingleby Barwick, Coulby Newham and Darlington on Teesside, plus Durham and Chester-le-Street. Over that year, the paper said, the group took over the former Beechdown Leisure Club in Basingstoke, closed its Whitworth Street site in Manchester, opened its first padel courts at Ingleby Barwick and filed planning applications for 20 more courts across its clubs. Membership stood at 219,743, the paper reported, and Duncan Bannatyne told it that nearly 3,000 staff worked across the UK.

Design and documentation.

Gym and health-club chains sell a place, so much of their visual identity lives in photographs of the clubs themselves: the equipment floor, the class studios, the changing areas and, increasingly, the details of a refit. The companies publish this imagery in their own press rooms and on club pages, and when a chain modernises, the new interior often becomes the story; RSG Group’s 2024 release on McFit described steel, concrete and wood rather than a new logo.

Many chains split one name into tiers and sub-brands. A club brand may run a premium line and a value line under separate colours, give its class formats their own names, or sell a training programme through its member app. Fitness First’s German owner, for example, separates BLACK and RED clubs, and the UK business launched a training service called “able” inside its app in 2025.

Campaign identities change faster than logos. Slogans, ambassadors and sports sponsorships give a chain public visibility for a few years, while a wordmark and its colours may last a decade or more. Where a rebrand is documented, it is usually in trade or marketing press at the time of the launch, and that is where the guides in this set look for it.

Ownership is often the least visible layer. Corporate websites, press releases and trade magazines record which investor owns a chain, how many clubs it counts and in which countries, and those figures change with each purchase or sale. The guides in this set give club, member and country counts only as a dated source states them, and name the owner as of that source.

Health Club, Spa, Hotel.

On its website, Bannatyne presents itself as three businesses under one name — Health Club, Spa and Hotel — each with its own menu and booking route. The health club section lists classes, personal training, gym inductions, a café bar, corporate membership, the Bannatyne App and a coaching add-on with its own sub-brand, B:Coached. The spa section carries the Elemis partnership, treatments, spa days, spa breaks and gift vouchers; the hotel section offers rooms and table bookings at the three hotels. The website footer links to an “About Duncan Bannatyne” page, to the Bannatyne Charitable Trust and to Operation Smile, the children’s charity.

The founder is part of the brand in a direct way: the group carries his surname, his biography sits in the site’s own navigation, and newspaper coverage of the business, such as the 2026 Teesside Live report on its results, is framed around him. That sets it apart from chains named after a place, a slogan or an opening-hours promise.

For a design guide, Bannatyne shows how a founder’s surname can hold together a mixed estate of gyms, spas and hotels under one mark. Compare David Lloyd Clubs, another British club chain named after its founder, and The Gym Group, a British gym chain built on a different model. For this guide we use a deep teal, an ink and a warm stone with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

Keep Bannatyne’s identity on hand — save it to a board in the Made Good inspiration library.