As we sweat through the second heatwave of the summer, we are once again reminded of how poorly our country is set up to deal with hot weather. Leaving aside the lack of air conditioning and the sweltering trains, one of our biggest deficiencies is our lack of access to safe swimming. However, a new pool in the heart of London’s Canary Wharf shows what is possible. It could be the start of a natatorial renaissance across the country.
I’ve always had issues with Canary Wharf. For three years in my early 20s, I masqueraded as a banker and the looming glass towers still bring back dark memories of suits and spreadsheets. More recently I have come to associate it with the point on the London Marathon course – roughly 18 miles in – where each year the wheels come off and my body begins its steady collapse towards the finish line. Either way, the place has never inspired uplifting thoughts. And yet, arriving at the new swimming area on a sunny Saturday morning, I couldn’t help but feel positive.
A 50-metre unheated freshwater ‘floating’ pool has been moored in Eden Dock beneath the skyscrapers. The water is natural – drawn from the dock, cut off from the Thames and filtered without chlorine – and is surprisingly clean and clear. On the day I visit it is a balmy 15C: just cold enough to wake me up but warm enough to make lane swimming without a wetsuit bearable even for a wimp like me. Though it was only the second day the pool had been open, by 9 o’clock it was filling up with a reassuring range of mature breaststrokers and athletic crawlers.
Sea Lanes, the company behind the Canary Wharf project, started with a more traditional heated, chlorinated lido on the beachfront in Brighton. When it opened in 2023, it was the first new outdoor public pool in the UK since the 1990s. The company’s aim is to help more people get into open water swimming and this certainly feels like a bridge between chlorinated pools and wild swimming. I had previously swum in the Royal Docks, a few miles to the east under the incoming planes of City airport. But, after my fellow swimmer tangled with a dead rat, I decided that that was perhaps a little too wild.
Leaving aside the lack of air conditioning and the sweltering trains, one of our country’s biggest deficiencies is our lack of access to safe swimming
Much of the UK’s lido sector is rooted in the nonprofit world. This can work wonderfully – Penzance’s community-owned Jubilee Pool not only rescued a derelict art-deco gem but drilled a 410-metre well to make it Britain’s only geothermal lido. There are many other admirable people making sacrifices to build, restore and run public pools. These include the charitable enterprises Better (which manages ten outdoor pools) and Places Leisure (which runs the country’s largest freshwater lido at Tooting Bec). But it can also involve years of fundraising, grant applications and haggling with councils. Nothing moves fast and management can feel painfully inefficient, as anyone who has been to a pool managed by Fusion Lifestyle – the nationwide charity that recently went into administration – can testify.
Sea Lanes takes a different approach. It is privately funded, negotiates leases from the council and aims to build swimming pools that are publicly accessible and financially viable, often by adding on higher-margin food stands, drinks areas, yoga studios and saunas. Crucially, its approach to funding makes the model more scalable: it has recently taken on the operation of Hilsea Lido in Portsmouth and is pursuing several other projects across the country.
We have always been a nation of swimmers. From Byron and his fellow romantics through to the heroically flawed Captain Webb who swam the channel and then, in search of more fame, made the ill-advised decision to swim across the Whirlpool Rapids below Niagara Falls. We practically invented competitive swimming in the early Victorian era before deciding that we would rather let others win because splashing was uncouth. Swimming peaked in the interwar years of art-deco lidos, beauty pageants and Butlins. But over the past 50 years affordable foreign holidays and financially constrained councils have led to the closure of the majority of Britain’s public outdoor pools. As I wrote last year, from a peak of more than 300, only around 160 remain active. When hot weather pushes people to seek other options, it can end in disaster. During the last heatwave over the May bank holiday, at least 15 people drowned – many unfamiliar with the dangers of open water in lakes and rivers ill-suited for swimming.
Foreign holidays, as anyone who has tried to book one lately knows, are becoming less affordable. Summers are going to get only hotter. And self-flagellation is very much in vogue. All of which suggests that more of us are going to want to go swimming. As a country we have amply proved we cannot build train lines, runways or houses. Let us hope, for everyone’s sake, that we can do a better job with swimming pools.
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