Yoga in Britain

Yoga in Britain is the practice of yoga, including modern yoga as exercise, in Britain. Yoga, consisting mainly of postures (asanas), arrived in Britain early in the 20th century, though the first classes that contained asanas were described as exercise systems for women rather than yoga. Classes called yoga, again mainly for women, began in the 1960s. Yoga grew further with the help of television programmes and the arrival of major brands including Iyengar Yoga and Ashtanga Vinyasa Yoga.

Before the 20th century, yoga was known only from the reports of travellers to India, which described deceptive vagabonds pretending to be pious. Among the first to publicise yoga in Britain in the early 1900s was the occultist Aleister Crowley, who confused yoga with magic in the public mind. In the 1930s, instructors such as Mary Bagot Stack taught postures similar to several modern asanas to women in Britain between the world wars, but these were not then described as yoga. At the same time, magazines such as Health and Strength ran articles on yoga, without mentioning asanas. In 1948 Sir Paul Dukes presented the BBC's first yoga television programmes to a small audience.

Classes called yoga began in the 1960s, becoming popular especially among women. Yogini Sunita attracted a large following in Birmingham from 1960. The British Wheel of Yoga developed from the Birmingham Yoga Club, founded by Wilfred Clark; it provided classes in venues such as church halls, trained teachers, and accredited yoga teacher training programmes. The 1968 visit of the rock music group The Beatles to Maharishi Mahesh Yogi's ashram in India drove counter-cultural interest in yoga. ITV gained a television audience of 4 million with its 1971 series Yoga for Health.

Iyengar Yoga was the first of the major yoga brands to arrive, with classes taught from 1970, initially under the Inner London Education Authority. With the commercialisation of classes from the 1980s, more energetic styles such as Ashtanga Vinyasa Yoga became popular, and private studios largely replaced local authority classes. The Sports Council made the British Wheel of Yoga the governing body of yoga in Britain in the 1990s. In the 21st century, yoga became so widespread as to become an "unremarkable" part of daily life,^[1] and many new types of yoga appeared, from aerial yoga to doga (yoga with dogs) and on paddleboards. Yoga in its modern form is being studied academically by the School of Oriental and African Studies.