Nuru or Tantric? Choosing Your London Session

The short version, for anyone still out in the rain

Nuru is the one with the gel. Tantric is the one with the pacing. If what you want is a sensation your skin has no file for yet, book nuru. If what you want is to walk back out into the wet with the week lifted off your shoulders, book tantric. Most people who try both end up alternating, which tells you neither answer is the wrong one.

Everything below is the long version, written by the person who takes the bookings. If you would rather skip the reading and just see who is working which nights, the studio homepage lists every therapist with her area, her hours and her rate.

What nuru actually involves

A warmed inflatable mat on the floor, the lamps turned down until the room is mostly shadow, and a great deal of gel. Real nuru gel is made from a seaweed — nori, the same one that wraps sushi — and it behaves like nothing else you will have had on your skin. Thick going on, and cool for a second, so that you draw a breath. Then almost frictionless. Then, once your own heat has got into it, oddly warm, as though the room had moved closer. It has no smell to speak of, and it rinses off in the shower without a trace — a surprise to guests who arrived braced for an oily walk back to the Tube.

The massage is body to body. She uses her forearms, her back, the whole warm length of herself rather than just her hands, and the gel takes away so much friction that the contact reads as one long slide rather than a series of strokes. You feel her weight arrive, and leave, and arrive again, and you lose track fairly early of which part of her is where. That is the entire trick. No exotic technique, nothing you need briefing on beforehand — an unfamiliar sensation, delivered slowly, by someone who knows how to keep it slow.

It is also the messiest thing we do. That is why it costs more, and why the room has to be set up before you arrive: mat inflated, gel warmed to blood heat, the heating turned up until the woman doing it has to open a window afterwards. Nuru cannot be improvised on the night, which is worth knowing if you are ringing round for a nuru massage in London at eight on a Friday and wondering why so many of the answers are no.

Three of ours do it — Noor in Paddington, Camille between Edgware Road and Whitechapel, Renée from the Barbican and Earl's Court — and those are the three faces below. Their diaries fill earlier than anyone else's, which is arithmetic rather than mystique: three women, a room that needs turning over after each guest, and a steady trickle of people who tried it once. If you want one of them on a Friday, book on the Monday.

A practical detail people tend to ask about afterwards, when it is too late to be useful: you shower before and after, both showers sit inside the booked time, and neither is hurried. The second is the better of the two: the gel goes down the drain in one sheet and your skin comes out finer than it went in. If your hair is long, tie it up. Otherwise you will be washing it twice.

Noor Paddington W2 · £300/hr Camille Edgware Rd W1 · Whitechapel E1 Renée Barbican EC2 · Earls Court SW5

What tantric does instead

No mat, no gel, no floor. Warm oil on a warm table, in a room lit by not very much. The oil is where the smell of the place lives — something faintly green and resinous that gets into the towels and, guests tell us, into the collar of a coat. The pace stays slow well past the point where you expect it to pick up; the whole body is worked in long continuous strokes, the hands heavy and unhurried, travelling the full length of you and back, and the target is your state rather than your muscles. Nobody goes looking for knots.

What it asks of you is time. A nervous system that walked in braced — a bad meeting, a stalled Elizabeth line, an inbox you can still feel from the table — takes a solid half hour to stand down, and there is no shortcut through that half hour. You will know when it happens. The breath drops somewhere lower, the rain on the window turns from a noise into a texture, and the hands on your back seem to have grown warmer, though they have not. Sixty minutes is a real session. It is also the booking guests most often wish, afterwards, that they had made longer.

That is Elise in the photograph, from Baker Street; the caption is not a figure of speech. She pauses with both palms flat on your back between one stroke and the next, for exactly long enough that you begin to wonder — and then not. Tantric is the more popular of the two by a wide margin, and it is what most people mean when they go looking for tantric massage in London. Nuru is the one they come back for.

So which one, honestly

Tantric, for a first visit. Not because nuru is intimidating — it is not — but because tantric is the better introduction to how a session of this kind is shaped, and because it works even on a body that arrives tense, sceptical and slightly damp. Nuru rewards a body that has already relaxed once in this setting.

Nuru, when you know what you want and what you want is novelty. It is the more physically striking of the two, and it is the one guests describe afterwards in the hallway, still pink from the shower, reaching for a word and not finding it. It makes a poor default only in the sense that a very good pudding makes a poor first course.

If you cannot decide, say so on the form. We will tell you honestly — including, on some nights, that neither is a good idea, because you sound like a person who needs a hot bath and an early night rather than an appointment.

Where in London any of this happens

This is the part visitors underestimate. London is not one place. It is several towns stitched together with a railway, and crossing to the wrong side of it after work eats the good half of the evening before you have taken your coat off.

Our rooms sit across central and west London, and every therapist is listed with her area and postcode rather than a street: Baker Street and Edgware Road in W1, Paddington and Bayswater in W2, Sloane Square in SW3, Earl's Court in SW5, Barbican in EC2. If you work in the City, EC2 is the sane choice on a weeknight — you can be on a table before the pubs have filled. If you are staying anywhere near Hyde Park, Bayswater is a walk rather than a journey, and a pleasant one, even in the drizzle.

The exact address arrives once your time is confirmed, never before. That is standard practice in this trade, and nothing to do with mystery: a published door number collects attention nobody wants, from the neighbours and from people who have never booked anything in their lives.

A few of the therapists work two locations across the week, which matters if you have someone particular in mind. Her own page carries the current pattern. Check it rather than guessing, especially on a wet night, when guessing wrong means a second trip round the Circle line.

What the difference costs

Tantric starts at £250 for sixty minutes. Nuru starts at £350, and the gap is the setup, the gel and the room turnaround it needs once you have gone. Ninety and 120-minute sessions exist for both, and the extra half hour costs proportionally less than the first — the full list sits on the rates page, and every therapist carries her own rate on her card.

Outcall to a hotel or a home is charged at the same rate as a visit to us, with no zone supplement anywhere inside London. That surprises people who have booked elsewhere in this city.

The figures in the panel below come from our own diary, not from a brochure, and between them they explain most of what people find odd about availability: three trained for nuru out of sixteen is why Friday nuru goes early, and eight of the sixteen in W2 is why Paddington is the easy booking and the Barbican the one to plan for.

3 of 16

of our therapists are trained for nuru. It needs the mat, the gel and a room turned over afterwards — not everyone takes it on.

£250–350

the full spread of hourly rates across the roster. The number sits on each woman's own card, and nothing is added in the room.

9

districts we work from, Baker Street to the Barbican. Eight of the sixteen are in W2 alone, which is why Paddington and Bayswater fill first.

13 hours

a day, 10:00 to 23:00, every day of the week. A session can start late enough to follow a full working day and a slow dinner.

The two lines, in both cases

Massage, and only massage — nothing on the list is a cover for anything else. The touch runs one way: the therapist works, the guest lies still and does not touch her. And a session stops the moment the guest says so. Those hold for nuru, for tantric and for everything else on the list, for every guest, without exception and without a conversation about it on the night.

They are printed here for the same reason they are printed on every other page of this site. A studio that stays vague about its boundaries in writing is being vague on purpose, and the vagueness is the answer.

Booking, practically

Sessions run daily from 10:00 to 23:00. Evenings from six go first, Thursday and Friday go earliest, and a Tuesday afternoon — if your week can spare one — gets you the pick of the roster.

Everything goes through the form, though WhatsApp and Viber work just as well. Say which session you want, roughly when, and whether you are coming to us or would rather we came to you. If you are still torn between the two, say that instead. We will ask two questions back, and you will have your answer before the kettle has boiled. After that there is nothing left for you to do but arrive — the lamp already low, the oil already warming, the rain somebody else's problem for an hour.

Loose ends