Going swimmingly

London Fields Lido

Inside the communal changing rooms at the Kings Hall Leisure Centre, the noise is deafening. Screeches from a party of children bounce off glazed walls. This is Hackney’s oldest functioning public pool, and today its liveliest.

After opening in 1897, it attracted 150,000 visitors in the first five months. Now the pool is operated by a leisure trust in partnership with Hackney Council.

It has over 21,000 swimmers a year, with the addition of local schools. Originally having three pools, the men’s second class and ladies pool are now converted into a sports hall and fitness gym.

General manager John Preston says, “We have a strong GP referral scheme here now, where we put people into a prescribed active gym programme to tackle problems such as obesity or mental health issues.”

Director of the Victorian Society and swimming enthusiast Ian Dungavell is a fan. He visited the pool as part of his “1000 year swim”. In an exhaustive survey of Britain’s fourteen surviving Victorian Pools, Dungavell swam a length for every year Kings Hall has been open, clocking up an impressive one hundred and eleven.

“Kings Hall is a great big, gutsy, big-boned pool hall,” he says. “The Victorians realised that a sturdy building was the only way to handle the amount of use the baths would get.”

With only one in 20 households having a bathroom, the “slipper baths” were welcomed by many. In their early lives, the pools were drained in winter, it being impossible to maintain tolerable temperatures during the coldest months. Temporary flooring transformed them into venues for concerts, exhibitions – even boxing matches.

Fellow first timer to Kings Hall is mum-to-be Claire. She says, “I was impressed, although I was a little surprised by the communal changing rooms and showers.

“My husband keeps trying to get me to go to the Lido, but I think I will wait till the summer and go with the baby.”

I visit the Lido on a cold Sunday in January. The water temperature is posted as 26 degrees. The pool is steaming. As London’s only outside heated Olympic pool, its 50 metres are amazingly leaf-free.

London Fields Lido is a testament to campaigns by the Hackney Society and the London Fields User Group, who battled for 18 years to return it to use.

Photographs show the overgrown poolside, cracked with large buddleia bushes before its refurbishment. Such decrepit sights are familiar at Haggerston Pool, which the Hackney Society also campaigned to bring back to use.

Readers with pictures and memories of the borough’s pools are invited to send them to the Hackney Citizen for possible donation to the Hackney Archive.