The box.
Two racks, a rower and a roller door that never quite shut. That's how it started in 2016. Eight years on it's 1,400 sq ft of iron under the railway arches in Hoxton — and the same blunt promise: walk in soft, walk out solid.
Built in the arches.
Marcus took on Arch 14 on Cremer Street in the spring of 2016 — a damp, low-ceilinged railway arch nobody else wanted. The rent was cheap because the trains shook the dust off the brickwork every four minutes. He hung two racks off the wall, dragged a single rower in off a skip and propped the roller door open with a 20kg plate.
The mission was never complicated. A room where ordinary people get genuinely strong — coached properly, scaled honestly, no theatre. Word travelled the way it does in East London: slowly, then all at once. Six members became sixty. Sixty became the waitlist we run today.
We've knocked through into the arch next door, laid proper platforms and built a recovery suite where the broom cupboard used to be. The trains still rattle the bar overhead. We kept that on purpose — it reminds you where you are.
Raw concrete. Real iron.
1,400 square feet, end to end. A wall-mounted rig with twelve pull-up stations and room to swing a kettlebell without clipping your neighbour. Eight competition lifting platforms — calibrated bumpers, deadlift bars, no rubber-coated nonsense. A dedicated 20-metre indoor sprint track laid in turf down the spine of the arch for sled work and HYROX runs.
The conditioning bay is stacked with rowers, ski ergs, assault bikes, sandbags and a sled corridor that takes a full weight stack and then some. The recovery suite at the back runs a contrast plunge, a four-person sauna and soft-tissue space — open the same 24 hours the rest of the floor is.
No mirrors-only crowd. No queue for the one good machine. Everything in here earns its footprint, and every inch of it is meant to be used hard.
No theatre.
Just work.
Coached every session. Scaled to the person in front of us. Built to keep you training for decades, not weeks.
Plenty of gyms sell you a door code and a row of treadmills and call it a day. We do the opposite. Every hour on the floor is coached, every block is programmed, and nobody gets left to wander. You don't have to know what you're doing when you walk in — that's the whole point of having coaches.
A coach on the floor, every session.
There's no such thing as turning up and being on your own here. A coach learns your name, knows your numbers and watches your bar speed. Form gets corrected before it becomes a habit. That's how people get strong without getting hurt.
Same room. Your numbers.
A first-timer and a national-level lifter run the same session, scaled to where they actually are. The board on the wall is everyone's. Nobody's too advanced to coach and nobody's too new to belong.
Programming that compounds.
We run scaleable 12-week strength blocks — percentage-based, progressive, tested. No random workout-of-the-day roulette. You can see exactly where you started and exactly where you're going, week on week.
Built to last, not to burn out.
The recovery suite isn't an afterthought, it's part of the plan. Plunge, sauna, mobility, soft-tissue — the unsexy work that keeps your joints in the game. We're building lifters who are still here in twenty years, not ones who flame out in twelve weeks.
This is the apex.
Two minutes from Hoxton Overground, behind a roller door that still rattles. 24/7 access, staffed 6am to 10pm, 60+ coached classes a week and 1,200 members who treat the place like it's theirs. Because it is.
The coaches.
Lifters, racers and recovery specialists who learn your name and write your numbers down. They're the reason it works.
Marcus
Head Strength CoachFounder and ex-competitive powerlifter. Built Apex out of Arch 14 in 2016 and still coaches the heaviest squat sessions on the schedule. If your deadlift is stuck, he's the one who unsticks it.
Priya
Conditioning & EngineRuns the Metcon Engine like a metronome — rowers, bikes, sleds, kettlebells, no mercy and no mess. Builds the kind of engine that turns up when the legs have already given out.
Tom
HYROX & PerformanceOwns the HYROX Prep squad and the 20-metre track. Sled push to wall ball to compromised running — he's drilled the eight-station format until it's muscle memory. Has put 40+ athletes on the podium.
Dani
Mobility & RecoveryRuns Recover + Mobilise and the recovery suite. Contrast plunge, sauna protocols, soft-tissue and guided mobility — the unglamorous work that keeps you in the rack instead of on the physio's table.
Sade
Strength & MetconBridges the barbell and the conditioning floor — coaches Strength Lab in the morning and ruthless metcon circuits by night. Brilliant with first-timers; she'll have you under a loaded bar by week two and loving it.
Visit the box.
Photos don't do the arch justice. Book a tour, take the 7-day trial, find out what you're made of under a real bar. No joining fee, no pressure — just turn up.