A choreographer travels to you: your own front room, the venue floor itself, or a room hired near a station that suits. Nobody else in the class, because there is no class. Zone 1 out to the edge of the M25.
Prices are further down —
five of them, no quote form
Fill this in and a person reads it, then rings to talk through the song, the date, and which corner of London we ought to be meeting in.
Want the numbers first? Scroll on a little and every price is there in full; the form keeps until you come back to it.
Check availability for your date.
Guests arrive from four directions, the venue is booked to the minute, and on an ordinary Tuesday the two of you are in different parts of the city entirely. The dance has to survive all of that, so it gets built around your week rather than around a timetable on a studio wall.
A panelled room off a Marylebone square, a warehouse in Hackney Wick, a register office followed by the back room of a Peckham pub, a lawn in Richmond with a hired floor bolted onto it. London couples marry in all of them, and usually two or three boroughs from wherever they live.
Your choreographer asks what the surface is, how tightly the guests will ring the floor, and what the song does with its middle eight. Then they write something for that specific space. Nothing is inherited from the couple taught the week before.
We match couples by area, so nobody spends fifty minutes on the Overground before an hour of teaching. Give us the postcode on the form and we will tell you who works near it.
Whoever you are matched with works the same way. They listen to your track, watch the two of you move for ten minutes, and write the dance themselves. There is no house choreography sitting in a folder and no syllabus to be got through by week four.
They will also be straight about what the time allows. If five lessons is more than your first dance actually needs, you will hear that before you have paid for five lessons.
Identical packages and identical numbers wherever in the country we teach. Per couple, never per head, and no London loading for the privilege of being in London.
One price, two people. It buys the teaching at whichever London address we agree on, whether that is a flat, a function room or a floor we have booked. If the routine grows and you want another session or two on the end, they can be added.
Thirty seconds of dancing. Two minutes of admin.
Fill in the form Prefer to talk it over? 07337 111560First dance lessons travel to whichever floor is easiest for the two of you. There are three options, and most London couples end up using at least two of them before the day.
Victorian conversions in Walthamstow, riverside new-builds in Greenwich, a third-floor flat in Islington with a rug that rolls. Clear the space a small dining table would take and there is enough to begin with.
Where a venue will open the room, an hour on the actual floor is the most valuable lesson in the package. Ceiling height, the true width of the floor, where the tables sit — every one of those changes what feels right.
When the flat is small or the neighbours are close, we book a room on your side of London and meet there. Which room depends on where you are; it is settled at the point the lesson is.
North through Islington, Camden, Crouch End, Highgate and Enfield. East across Hackney, Bow, Stratford and Walthamstow. South over Peckham, Dulwich, Brixton, Clapham, Greenwich, Blackheath and Croydon. West by Fulham, Chiswick, Ealing, Richmond, Twickenham and Kingston upon Thames. We go beyond the Greater London boundary as well, for weddings out at Epsom, Sevenoaks, Brentwood and Watford. A first dance in London obeys the city's one rule: we come to you, never the reverse.
Plenty of London couples open the call with that line, usually inside the first minute. It is a perfectly good plan. A sway with a defined start, one turn you both trust and an agreed way of stopping reads as composure. The same sway without those three things reads as two people waiting for a song to finish.
Others want the room making noise, and London venues generally have the floor to allow it. A first dance rarely needs more than ninety seconds before guests are waved on, so the ambition goes into those ninety seconds rather than into length. Ask your instructor which stretch of the song is strong enough to hold it, and expect a blunt answer.
Outside the M25 We teach first dance couples in St Albans, Reading, Guildford, Chelmsford and Luton as well.
Local ones here. Anything that is not London-specific — lesson counts, footwear, how early to begin — is answered over on the main page.
Wherever is least annoying, and it can change from lesson to lesson. Most couples do the early ones at home in their own postcode and save one for the far end of London closer to the day. Your instructor is the one doing the travelling, so neither of you has to cross the city twice in an evening.
No. The five packages cost the same in Croydon as in Camden, and the same in London as anywhere else on the site. They are priced for the couple rather than the person, and there is no travel supplement bolted on afterwards.
A little, and it changes the shoes more. Stone, tile and polished concrete are slow underfoot and punishing on a spin, while sprung wood and hired floors let you turn freely. Say what the surface is early and the routine gets built for it rather than repaired in the last week.
Usually. The dance is built for two people, so you both need to be in the room for most of it, but a session can be spent drilling one person's part while the other is in a different time zone. Say so when you enquire and the lessons get planned around the diary instead of against it.
Quietly, and in socks. Most of what needs rehearsing is shape and timing rather than volume, and both work at half power in a small space. If it genuinely will not do, move a lesson or two onto a hired floor and keep the flat for walk-throughs.
It is one of the commonest patterns we see. Lessons happen at your London address through the ordinary weeks, and if the venue is reachable we look at getting an hour there in the run-up. Where it is not, the last lesson recreates the floor size indoors as closely as we can manage.
Yes, and it is far better to know now. A small floor rules out travelling steps and rewards turns, changes of direction and anything that reads well from close range. Send a photograph or a rough measurement and the dance is written to fit inside it rather than trimmed down afterwards.
Got this far? That tends to be the point at which people pick up the phone.
Plan your London first dance One lesson, £75, both of you included · any London postcode