Tooting Bec Lido © South London SC
Eight months ago, Time Out launched its Save Our Pools campaign to highlight the poor resources for swimming in the capital. The campaign certainly hit a nerve: we were inundated with your experiences of dirty water, dilapidated changing rooms and uncertain futures for your local pools
Tooting Bec Lido © South London SC
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We found that as the capital gears up to the 2012 Olympics, seven of London’s pools have closed in the last 12 years, while 16 faced imminent closure or were falling into disrepair. Although the government has ploughed £50 million over the last ten years into pools in London, experts agreed that the sport was still woefully underfunded, and a report in June from the Audit Commission found that swimming pools had been left crumbling. Meanwhile, investment in sports facilities has remained at the same level for the past ten years, while the cost of pool repairs has nearly doubled in that time.
Eight months on what has changed? Actually, rather a lot. Swimming baths have suddenly become the political issue du jour. We look back over a phenomenal year for the capital’s pools.
Feature continues
Pools of the year
Last year saw a renaissance for lidos: London Fields lido in Hackney reopened in October after laying unused for 18 years; Brockwell Park lido had its funding secured; London hosted its first lido conference and Tooting Bec lido secured additional funding from Wandsworth Council in its centenary year. Plans to reopen Uxbridge lido have also been given the go-ahead.
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| Marshall Street baths © Balthazar Serreau |
There’s also good news for indoor baths. Marshall Street baths in Soho has been given the green light for refurbishment by Westminster Council; meanwhile, the head of the Corporation of London, which runs Hampstead ponds, vowed the ponds would close ‘over my dead body’. Mid-2007 will also finally see the opening of Hackney’s troubled Clissold Leisure Centre.
Most dramatically of all, in December, Lewisham’s Mayor Stephen Bullock made a dramatic turnabout to prevent the closure of Ladywell baths. Bullock’s Labour-led council suffered severe electoral losses in May over his plans to demolish the pool to make way for a school, but he swore at the time that he would ‘not be changing his mind’. In November, however, after strong local campaigning, Cllr Bullock announced that the pool would stay open, the school would be built elsewhere, and that this was, of course, ‘the result I was always striving for’. The Save Ladywell Pool Campaign, he added, was ‘a great example of how local people can get their views heard’. Oddly, the Mayor told Reporter in an interview just the previous week that the campaign, led by ‘a very small group of backward-looking people’, was ‘pathetic’.
In Camden, it was a similar story as Lib Dems took control of the council in part thanks to their promise to keep open all three pools at the Kentish Town baths and last week the council launched a public consultation on the baths’ £22.7 million refurbishment, which begins in February.
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1 comment
The UK is just so far behind in the availability of 50 meter competition pools than many less populated and certainly less funded countries in the world.
We have a new 50m pool opened recently called the K2 sports centre in Crawley, West Sussex but the actual 50m pool itself is only open for 60-90 minutes in the morning mon - fri. How awful is that! Many people would love to swim in this size pool for health and fitness but get taken way back to the back of the line as the swimming clubs always have preferental treatment over the public into using the 50m pool. I understand the facility can get a dual purpose and increased revenue out of splitting the pool down the middle, but surely it defeats the whole point of advertising the 50m pool as such!?
At least give the public and other clubs the chance to be able to experience the 50m pool in all it's glory in the morning, afternoon, evening and weekends, and not just for the few that are able to get up at some ungodly hour in the morning and swim before work!