By Ifan Llewelyn
“A working girl has to be sexy, elegant, but also slutty, because a man loves a slut.”
There’s something about a heavy Sheffield accent that makes you feel they know exactly what they’re talking about. This can’t be truer of the ensemble of women working at the busiest brothel in Britain’s steel city, Sheffield’s City Sauna. Since airing on Channel 4 in 2015, A Very British Brothel has been a go-to watch for a trashy Sunday afternoon, giving overdue attention to Britain’s sex trade. The story of family-run City Sauna who specialise in having a roster of older women on the books to please their clientele really goes into the nitty-gritty of running a successful business, from blue balls to coleslaw.
Undoubtedly, the star of the show is City Sauna’s longest-serving working girl Anna, who’s been entertaining gentlemen along the city’s ‘golden mile of sex’ for twenty years. Having joined the girls at sauna four years before, she quickly became a customer favourite.
An astute businesswoman, she knows exactly what she wants and how to make money from what she enjoys most. Throughout the 47 minutes we spend with her she’s an endless source of cold hard life advice, and is said to be “quite the squirter”. Enjoy these pearls of wisdom that we could all learn to live by:
“If I can’t do it after I’ve tried it once, I’ll say I’m sorry I can’t do that again. But at this precise moment, I have not found anything at all I cannot do.”
“I take a lot of pride in my own work. I make sure that customer is happy… within reason.”
“I’m not a miracle worker. If you can’t finish, you can’t finish. It’s not my fault.”
The full documentary is still available to stream on Channel 4 On Demand and we really can’t overstate how much you need to watch this healthy helping of sex with a side of Gregg’s corned beef pasty.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TTRvDN-XLK8&t=300s
