Kingsley shares his story, how he became interested in health and fitness, massage and yoga and the inspiration behind starting Kimantra Urban Spa in Islington, North London.

“I was one of those skinny kids who was really good at athletics at school. Athletics is great because it's a wonderful way of using the body to express yourself. What was interesting was, how you become a champion, within 10s or in my case with the 400 meters, 40-odd seconds.

The winner is the one who wants it the most, who is prepared to just do it. And it was a good mantra for me because I realised if I took that philosophy and put it into practice in other areas of my life, I would always achieve the things I wanted to achieve.

So athletics was a great training, it was a great discipline and running and competing was my passion. I felt healthy, I felt free, I felt great. It was a phase of my life on which I look back and think it was a wonderful period.

After athletics I moved into personal training. I love personal training. For me it was a natural progression because people always asked if I could train them, how do I get fit, how do I stay fit etc. So it was a natural progression really, and I think I did pretty well at that as well.

I was always looking for the next thing and I got introduced to massage and then I went to India in 2000. I started off in a place called Trivandrum and basically toured all over India. I went to places like Chennai, Varanasi, Rishikesh, Pushkar. It was amazing.

Each time I would stop at Ashrams and meet amazing people, gurus and holy men and they would tell me and teach me about India, meditation, yoga and massage.

Having been influenced by what I saw, it set the ball in motion and in 2000 I thought: wouldn't it be great to open a spa?

I wanted to create an amazing spa that wasn't intimidating, that local people could come in and have fantastic treatments and walk out feeling fresh and relaxed and that was my goal. Kimantra is now a wonderful place which has established itself in Islington as a fantastic place for massage and treatments.”