A family-run workplace wellbeing partner, working alongside UK organisations since 2010.
How Stretching the City started
“I founded Stretching the City in 2010.
At the time it was a one-woman yoga business, running early-morning classes in the basement gyms of a handful of City law firms.
The business grew slowly, organically, and mostly by word of mouth. Yoga became yoga plus pilates. Pilates became yoga plus pilates plus massage. Then chair massage, then mental health workshops, then manager training, then keynotes and signature programmes.
My sister Katy Chambers joined a few years in, bringing 20 years of HR leadership experience with her. Where I’d been building the workshop side of the business, Katy built the professional wrap around it — contracts, delivery infrastructure, the operational precision that lets a business deliver for Sky one week and a 30-person start-up the next. Between us, we’ve now worked with over 350 UK and international organisations.
What hasn’t changed is who runs it. Katy and I are still the two people you’ll speak to when you get in touch. There’s no sales team. No account manager to hand you off to. If you’re scoping a workshop with Stretching the City, one of us reads your first email.”
Sally Lovett, Founder & Wellbeing Strategist | Sally also delivers keynotes for UK and global audiences — see the speaker hub here.
Trusted by:
What we do now
Sixteen years in, Stretching the City leads the way in the UK workplace wellbeing market. Our work covers:
- Wellbeing workshops: 50+ sessions across mental health, resilience, women’s wellbeing, men’s wellbeing, nutrition, movement and awareness days. In-person UK or virtual worldwide.
- Signature wellbeing programmes: 6-12 month structured plans combining workshops, manager training and pulse measurement.
- Workplace wellbeing strategy: For HR and People teams building or refreshing the framework underneath the activity.
- Keynote speaking: Sally’s talks on sustainable performance, women in the workplace and workplace wellbeing more broadly. Delivered for IOD, Total Energies, Jamie Oliver Group, Amazon and others.
Alongside Stretching the City, we also run our sister company People & Performance, our leadership and team development consultancy delivering longer-form capability programmes for organisations investing in leadership at depth.
What makes Stretching the City different
It’s a family business, and it stays that way. Sally and Katy own Stretching the City. We didn’t take investment, we didn’t hire an agency, and we haven’t scaled by adding layers between us and the client. That’s a deliberate choice. It means every scoping call, every proposal, every difficult conversation goes through one of us — and it means the standards, culture and delivery quality you’d expect from a family business (rather than a growth-stage consultancy) is exactly what you get.
We work as colleagues, not as a supplier. Our best client relationships aren’t transactional — they’re properly collaborative. We sit inside HR planning conversations, help build the internal case, come back with data at year-end so the budget conversation for next year lands well. We think about your team’s calendar the way an internal wellbeing lead would. That’s why our average client stays with Stretching the City for four years and counting — not because we bill for account management, but because we act like we’re part of the team.
Named facilitators, deep specialisms. Our workshops aren’t delivered by generic “wellbeing consultants.” They’re led by chartered psychologists, GPs with special interests in menopause and adolescent mental health, sport psychologists with Olympic-cycle credentials, BANT-accredited nutritional therapists, and specialist coaches who’ve been doing this specific work for decades.
Practical, not theatrical. The workplaces getting real value from wellbeing investment are the ones who’ve moved past awareness-day posters and lunch-and-learns. Our sessions end with action plans people use the day after. Our programmes measure something. Our facilitators tell you the harder truths when the harder truths need saying. That combination — evidence-based, commercially grounded, honest — is what makes Stretching the City distinctive.
How we work with organisations
Every engagement starts with a 20-minute scoping call. We use it to understand your team context, existing wellbeing infrastructure, the moment you’re marking or the problem you’re solving, and what “success” would actually look like six months from now. No pitch, no follow-up chase emails. If we’re not the right fit, we tell you.
From there, engagements typically fall into one of three shapes:
Single workshops. The lightest engagement. A team wants to mark an awareness moment (Mental Health Awareness Week, World Mental Health Day, IWD) or address a specific issue. One session, delivered well.
Multi-workshop programmes. Four to eight workshops across the year, aligned to the moments in your calendar. Most of our mid-sized clients sit here. The pattern is consistent enough to build cultural momentum, light enough not to overwhelm scheduling.
Signature partnerships. Six to twelve workshops, plus manager training, pulse measurement, quarterly reviews and year-end reporting. This is where the properly collaborative relationships live — the ones where we’re effectively an extension of your HR team. Sky, TikTok, Accenture and others have used this shape for multiple years.
Who we work with
Across sectors: Professional services, financial services, technology, media, retail, healthcare, education, public sector, government agencies, and dozens of scale-ups.
Organisations of all sizes: From 15-person start-ups running their first-ever wellbeing session, to FTSE 100 organisations running multi-region signature programmes across international offices.
UK and global delivery: In-person delivery across the UK (headquartered in London, delivering in Manchester, Birmingham, Bristol, Edinburgh and beyond). Virtual delivery worldwide — we’ve worked with teams in North America, Europe, the Middle East and APAC.
What our clients say:
Stretching the City delivered five fantastic workshops during our Mental Health Awareness Week here at Accenture. The speakers were extremely knowledgeable, engaging and professional and helped us deliver a MHA Week to remember. Thanks Stretching the City!
I wanted to thank you both for all your help in setting up mental health and wellbeing sessions. They have enabled us to be more open about mental health at OMD, and more specifically about anxiety and depression. I know people have found them incredibly useful.
Ségolène Méheust | Diversity, Inclusion, Learning & Belonging Manager | OMD
“On behalf of the business, I wanted to say a heartfelt thanks to the Stretching in the City wonder-team for our wellbeing at work week. The feedback has been brilliant.”
What we stand for
We say when we’re not the right fit. The single best signal a wellbeing partner can send is honesty about their own limits. If your team needs something we don’t deliver well, we’ll tell you. We’ve referred clients to specialist providers more than once, and won that trust back when the next brief came around.
We treat wellbeing as a business function, not a category of niceness. The organisations getting real value from their wellbeing investment measure it, name their pillars, allocate a budget, and assign owners. That’s how we work with clients too — as a commercial function embedded in performance, retention and culture, not as an “extras” line item.
We show up as ourselves. No agency polish. No corporate positioning statements read off a slide. Sally and Katy sound like Sally and Katy on emails, on calls, and in the room. That’s the culture. It works because it’s real.
Ready to talk?
A 20-minute scoping call is the best way to explore whether STC is the right partner for what you’re building. You’ll speak directly to Sally or Katy. You’ll leave with a clear view of what would work, what it would cost, and whether we’re the right fit — even if the answer is no. Drop us a line, or book a call below.
Also worth a read:
- Meet the Stretching the City team
- Our clients and case studies
- Sally as a keynote speaker
- Our sister company: People & Performance
Planning for 2027?
Our 2027 UK Wellbeing Awareness Days Calendar is now live — every key wellbeing moment for next year with workshop ideas and booking windows.