Ishigaki Jujitsu Club

Four people started this in 1994 because they wanted somewhere to train jujitsu where being gay wasn't a thing you had to manage in the changing room. Thirty years later, Ishigaki is the UK's largest LGBT+ martial arts club, running five classes a week between London and Brighton, and it won Out For Sport's Club of the Year in 2025.

What actually happens on the mat

This isn't a self-defence-for-a-day workshop dressed up as a club. Ishigaki trains under the Jikishin Jujitsu Association, which means grading, belt progression, and technique drawn from actual attacks — punches, grabs, strangles, defence on the ground — rather than the padded-suit sparring most people picture when they hear "martial arts." In London that's Tuesday nights at Finsbury Leisure Centre near Old Street, plus Wednesday evenings and Saturday afternoons at the in2sports centre in Canary Wharf, so there's a session that fits most work schedules without much excuse-making.

The beginner pitch is specific rather than a vague "all welcome": new-joiner sessions are free, run monthly, and the club says outright that people pick up technique at different speeds and instructors will work at whatever pace suits you. Loose clothing, bare feet, eighteen and over unless you've cleared it with them first. Nobody is handed a black belt for showing up, but nobody is left behind for being new either.

Why the LGBT+ framing isn't incidental

A lot of "inclusive" gym marketing means a rainbow sticker on an otherwise unchanged room. Ishigaki's founding premise was the opposite of decorative — four people in 1994 built a club specifically because mainstream martial arts spaces made their sexuality something to navigate rather than ignore, and that's stayed the organising fact of the place through three decades, several changes of venue, and a jump from one class to five a week. It also runs self-defence outreach with London councils aimed at LGBT people specifically, which is a different proposition from a general class that happens not to mind who shows up.

Why bother

Most people looking for a gay-friendly gym end up finding a gym that's fine with gay people, which is a lower bar than it sounds. Ishigaki is a martial arts club, full stop, that happens to have been built by and for LGBT+ people from day one — real grading, real technique, three decades of continuity, and a door that's genuinely easy to walk through as a total beginner. If you're already circling London's queer sport scene the way London Otters pulls people onto the water, this is the equivalent for anyone who's ever wondered what it'd be like to actually learn to fight.