Saving our swimming pools – the health of our nation depends on it! 

The pandemic has become a clichéd explanation for trends that were already underway. The high street crisis was exacerbated, not caused, by the pandemic. We didn’t discover Amazon in 2020. And we were set on a trajectory to hybrid working as soon as broadband speeds became fast enough for most of us. 

Wrongly attributing these things to the pandemic perpetuates the myth that we can somehow reverse the clock. If covid caused it, then ‘post-covid’ might fix it. It’s a license to procrastinate – a chance to waste five years wringing our hands about the pandemic before we finally address the knotty problems that are really causing empty shops, moribund town centres, and barren offices. 

This problem is acute when it comes to leisure centres. Most of our municipal leisure centres were borne of a model conceived in the 1960s and delivered through the 1970s and 1980s. It was based on the idea that consolidating facilities under one roof would deliver better services, more efficiently. 

By the 1990s, we were already feeling the unintended consequences of this approach. Large leisure centres drew from a wide catchment, divorcing them from their communities. This was reinforced by local authorities handing over the buildings to national operators whose business models depend on economies of scale, and wringing every last ounce of efficiency out of the service. Then these buildings reached the limits of their design life just as local authority budgets contracted, and they were starved of reinvestment.

We inadvertently created a two-tier sport and leisure infrastructure, with threadbare services in crumbling buildings for people who can’t pay for membership at their nearest private gym. The whole leisure centre model was already at the precipice in 2019. Covid closures and sky-high energy costs are simply pushing them over the edge. This has wider implications. Many of these buildings sit on large sites in prominent locations. Shuttering leisure centres will further blight town centres in decline. 

But what if there is an opportunity here for developers and their architects to partner with local authorities and rethink the whole model? How can we repurpose or replace these buildings, while re-providing better services, more sensitive and aligned to the needs of their communities? 

It is especially important for one vital part of the jigsaw: the swimming pool. The number of available pools has been declining since 2009, and many haven’t re-opened since lockdown. Swim England predicts that a further 2,000 pools (40%) could be lost by the end of the decade, and has launched a #SaveOurPools campaign for more funding.

Patching up existing stock isn’t enough. This is a chance to reflect on the importance of swimming pools and why we need them. 

Somewhere along the journey we somehow convinced ourselves that swimming matters most as a competitive sport. Since 2000, we spent over £1 billion on a few 50m pools and measured progress by Olympic medals. It worked: we’ve won 24 swimming medals since then. Meanwhile, public participation in swimming has fallen off a cliff, with ‘a quarter of pupils finishing primary school unable to swim.’ 

In truth, most of us swim for fun, for exercise, and – frankly – because we live on an island that is criss-crossed by canals. Our kids should know how to swim! They’ll survive if they trip and fall onto a tennis court. It’s a bigger problem if they fall into a lake.

Kids generally don’t learn to swim in 50m pools. We need more waterslides and saunas, lounging space for sunbathers, and a much more permissive attitude to cannonballs in the deep end. We need to reinstate our historic lidos and build some new ones. We can restore at least some of our remaining Victorian baths before they are all turned into funky workspace. 

Then, if you’re lucky enough to control a picturesque waterfront, you can probably take down a lot of those hysterical ‘DANGER’ signs. There are no crocodiles in Millwall Dock. It’s not that dangerous as long as you can swim. 

In short, we need to remember why these swimming pools are so important – to our health, our safety, our neighbourhoods and communities. And we need to fund, design and manage them accordingly.