Shrewsbury Yoga Studio Opens Second Location, Expanding Community and Charity Work

Jenna Blair Yoga Wellbeing Centre on Belle Vue Road, Shrewsbury is set to renovate a neighbouring property into a second studio and wellbeing space, more than doubling its current footprint with an extra yoga studio and four rooms for holistic services. The expansion is backed in part by Start Up Loans, building on a centre that began as a pandemic-era side project and has since secured roughly £70,000 in grants for community programming.

Founder Jenna Blair discovered yoga in 2017 following a period of personal bereavement. By 2019 she was running regular classes alongside her work as an estate agent before going self-employed just as Covid lockdowns took hold, leaving her without access to government financial support. "During Covid, I wasn't entitled to any financial support as I had just gone self-employed. I managed to survive the lockdowns, and the business thrived, teaching in the local park and spaces outside at reduced numbers and online," she said.

The Belle Vue Road studio has its own lockdown origin story. "At the end of 2020, I was on a lockdown walk and I found this dilapidated building which I believed could be brought to life and made useful," Blair recalled. Family help proved essential: "I was fortunate to have a brother-in-law to help renovate the premises from a disused shell in lockdown 2021 through to a yoga studio we have used ever since."

That studio now runs classes, workshops, teacher training and retreats for participants ranging from babies to people in their nineties. The community reach extends through a not-for-profit arm Blair established in 2022 to fund free and subsidised sessions for refugees, NHS workers, mums and babies, and people with special educational needs and disabilities. Five weekly Yoga For Cancer classes run entirely free, fully covered by grant funding, with teachers paid a set rate by the not-for-profit arm rather than absorbing the cost themselves.

Blair has been direct about the next step: "I am currently in the process of evolving to charity status and seeking trustees as this project has grown substantially, including gaining £70,000 of grants to offer free and subsidised sessions." To handle the expanded operational load, the centre recently created a new full-time centre manager role.

The adjoining disused property will be renovated to contain an extra studio plus four additional rooms for holistic therapies, taking capacity well beyond anything the current single-building setup allows. No confirmed opening date for the new premises has been announced. Trustee recruitment and formal charity registration are the next milestones for a studio that has moved, in under five years, from outdoor teaching in a Shrewsbury park to a two-premises wellbeing centre with a funded community programme.