A pool 67 metres long and 22 metres wide. The sun shines and the birds are singing – if you can hear them. Because the pool is full of splashing, screaming, laughing children, and grown-ups who become children too, once they’re in the water. People in deck chairs watch them. Others stroll up steps to the grandstand restaurant, its balcony overlooking the pool, for lunch or an Eldorado ice cream. Fountains play at either end of the main pool, aerating the water. There are two springboards in the middle, and a double flume of Alton Towers proportions that unloads shrieking youngsters at high speed into one of the two shallow ends. Fitness fanatics plough up and down – 24 lengths and you complete a mile.
Advance a few years to the present day. You can hear the birds now, in the silence. The great pool is empty, except for a scatter of drink cans. The deck chairs are gone, the pavilion and changing rooms deserted. Where bare feet padded along the concrete, weeds are growing. The fitments have been vandalised and the flaking concrete of the buildings is smothered in graffiti. Such is the fate of three-quarters of all outdoor pools since the 1930s. Unloved and unwanted, lidos have been going the way of pogo sticks and drive-in cinemas.
Yet, in their heyday, millions flocked to them every summer. From Brighton to Edinburgh, from Morecambe to Penzance, they were the most exciting way imaginable of keeping fit and having fun. For children such as Ken Pearce, who had grown up swimming in the local river, the opening of a lido in Uxbridge in 1935 was a revelation. From his grammar school, “We arrived at 8.30am, and in May it could be pretty cold. I remember shivering so much that I couldn’t do up the buttons on my clothes.” But in hot weather, queues formed outside the turnstiles. In 1971, on a scorching-hot day, Finchley Lido took in 11,962 people.
Although people had bathed in ponds for centuries, the fashion for lidos didn’t get going until the early 1930s. The Germans led the way when it was recognised that sunlight provided nutrients that helped combat chest ailments such as tuberculosis. Until then, only workmen sported tans: anybody with pretensions cultivated a pallor. By the end of the 1930s, according to Janet Smith in her book about Britain’s lidos, Liquid Assets (English Heritage, 2005), hardly a town in Britain was without an open-air pool.
Of course, lidos weren’t your average swimming pool. As their name, deriving from Venice’s Lido, suggests, they aspired to the glamour of an urban beach. The architects were building temples to the sun. They boasted porticoes and pillared loggias. Stepped seating rose like amphitheatres from the sun decks around the pool, so that it became an arena in which the swimmers took centre stage. The designers favoured white modernism with art-deco flourishes and a clock tower. Some lidos are listed, and many more would have stood a chance of preservation if the bulldozer and the ball and chain hadn’t got there first.
In the days before private swimming pools and cheap flights to the sun, lidos were as democratic a recreation as could be imagined. Everybody learnt to swim, for their own safety. School groups came. Beauty contests and fitness classes were held, along with water-polo matches and races with professional swimmers. Diving exhibitions were popular; people paid threepence to watch them. Fairy lights were switched on and music played. Entertainment could be provided by the Roy Fransen Aquabats with “spectacular fire dives”, or the Trio Salton Trampolinis or Dare Devil Peggy and Highboard Hilda Bee Franolly. At Margate Lido, opened in 1927 and operating for 50 years, Tracey Emin remembers bars, tearooms, gift shops, ice-cream parlours and a puppet theatre. “It was so exotic,” she recalls. “Margate seemed like the Mediterranean.”
The water began draining out of lidos with the arrival of Margaret Thatcher. By penalising local authorities that exceeded their budget, and making them farm out key council services to competitive tender, she delivered a double blow. There was no statutory duty upon councils to fund open-air swimming pools. Lidos were expensive, and with budgets under pressure from central government, the hunt was on to privatise them. But the “leisure operators” to whom the lidos were contracted out found they needed council subsidies to keep the business afloat. Between them, they cut costs and corners. Staff were laid off and opening times reduced. Pools and the buildings became shabby; even the water quality suffered.
If lidos had continued to attract large crowds, private enterprise could have made them work. But in the 1980s and 90s, families chose to combine swimming with cheap flights to the sun. Sunbathing lost much of its allure with the new fear of skin cancer. Children stayed at home and watched TV. One by one, lidos closed and became garden centres, bowling greens, fish farms, car parks, supermarkets, housing estates or just rectangles of grass. At their peak, 300 lidos were operating in Britain; now there are 97. In London there used to be 68; now there are eight. None survive in Birmingham, Manchester or Liverpool. At the present rate of closure, within 30 years there won’t be any open-air pools left. But in the past year or two, something strange and wonderful has been taking place. Tinside Lido, in its dramatic setting below Plymouth Hoe, reopened in 2003. Bristol’s Clifton Pool, which closed in 1990, is being refurbished, and Droitwich Lido in Worcestershire, closed in 2000, is coming back after a five-year campaign. London’s Brockwell Park Lido, known as Brixton Beach, is being rescued. London Fields, Hackney’s only open-air pool, is due to reopen in October after 18 years; it hopes to be a training pool for the 2012 Olympic Games.
Listing by English Heritage helps. In 1991 only three open-air pools were listed Grade II; 11 more are now preserved, among them Broomhill Pool in Ipswich, Suffolk, which has the Olympic length of 50 metres. Listing gives a focus for campaigners to set up charitable trusts and work with councils to secure a lido’s future. A recent conference called Reviving Lidos, which brought together pool operators, swimmers, architects and councillors, will report to the Department for Culture, Media and Sport.
Public-private partnerships, especially when aided by the Heritage Lottery Fund, can work to get lidos back in business. Arguments are put forward: the recent run of hot summers; a return to simpler pleasures at a time when lives are increasingly hectic; a breath of fresh air in the density of urban life. However, the spectres of health and safety hover.
In the old days, people could walk in and swim. Now no pool can open without at least one qualified lifeguard present, and four lifeguards for big pools, each costing up to £9 an hour. Disability rules demand the provision of ramps and a hoist where possible. Public liability insurance may place an untenable burden on smaller pools. Aerating fountains apparently pose a health risk. Diving boards are not permitted where swimming is taking place. The Atlantis Waterpark in Scarborough failed to open at the start of the 2005 season because the pool bottom had been painted the wrong sort of blue, which might have prevented a lifeguard spotting a body in the water. There has even been a move to discourage large goggles, in case they somehow harm other swimmers.
If the authorities really cared about child safety, they would relax some of these regulations. Swimming has just been dropped from the list of sports children are expected to practise at secondary school. Despite the school-standards minister, Jim Knight, declaring that being able to swim is an essential skill, the number of school pools has fallen from around 5,000 in 1972 to 2,000 today – and, on average, 70 children each year drown in our ponds and rivers. Lidos can save lives. They might be kept open all year round by putting sliding roofs over heated pools, or else bubble roofs. Or they could be used in winter for scuba-diving training, or frozen over to make ice rinks. In this way they would be eligible for money from the Sports Lottery Fund, which has so far refused funding because the pools aren’t open to swimmers in winter.
As for Uxbridge Lido, closed in 1998, Ken Pearce might still around to see it restored to its full glory. There will be “fun waters”, with a chute for children, and “leisure waters” set apart from serious swimmers. Planning permission has been granted, and the lido was mentioned as part of a potential Olympic training centre in presentations to the International Olympic Committee. Seven million pounds is all it would take, guv. Any offers?
