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I learned to swim in Aberdeen’s Bon Accord Baths, a stern, granite pile dating from 1937, executed in a purse-lipped, Scottish municipal version of art deco. While not exactly sybaritic, it did have an unforgettable sense of spatial and social drama. Replete with a four-tier diving platform and a 15ft deep end – “Scotland’s deepest deep end” – the pool was usually a frantic free for all, bodies churning in water, some hurtling perilously off the diving boards.
Ingrained in my memory, it resembled the pool in north London painted in 1971 by Leon Kossoff, the figurative artist who died earlier this month: packed with swimmers plashing and cavorting, you can practically smell the chlorine. Kossoff’s vision of cacophonous communality contrasts with David Hockney’s lushly ambrosial Californian pools of the same period, with their narcissistic lone bathers, aptly epitomising the difference between swimming in the public and private spheres.
Whether for survival, sport or recreation, humans have always found a reason to swim. Healthful and sociable, swimming is an unmitigated individual and collective good, kind to bodies of all ages, shapes and dispositions. It is also the most sensuous form of physical exercise. Paul Valéry, the French poet and philosopher, described it as “fornication avec l’onde”.
Summer brings out pleasure-seeking bathers, frolicking in the cooling embrace of lidos, ponds and sea baths. Last year’s intense heatwave saw siege conditions at London’s Brockwell Lido, one of the capital’s more popular open air pools. And so, with immaculate timing, the Royal Institute of British Architects (RIBA), in partnership with the Victoria and Albert Museum in London, this month opens Into the Blue, a display telling the story of British bathing habits. From Roman baths to Zaha Hadid’s London Aquatics Centre, the swimming pool comes to life through the architectural drawings, photographs and models in the RIBA’s collections.
Andrea Palladio’s conjectured reconstruction of the Baths of Caracalla, the second largest of ancient Rome’s thermae, roots formal bathing culture in classical antiquity, though its origins go back much further. Equipped with hot, cold and tepid baths, together with gymnasiums and libraries, Caracalla was a hedonistic temple calculated to cultivate body and mind. Bronze mirrors directed sunlight into the natatio or swimming pool, capable of holding 1,600 people.
Roman baths provided the model for the bath houses that emerged in Britain from the 17th century onwards. Over time, these evolved into the modern, more sportif pool. De Arte Natandi, published in English in 1658 as The Compleat Swimmer, provided early instruction on technique, with woodcuts illustrating variants of breaststroke and backstroke. However, as an activity with salacious propensities – scantily clad or naked people in proximity to each other – swimming was disdained and discouraged, especially by the church.
Cleanliness was always next to godliness. The Baths and Wash-houses Act of 1846, which established a network of public buildings in British towns and cities, was primarily impelled by a Victorian crusade against dirt. Associated with ignorance and immorality, dirt was also seen as an impediment to an efficient workforce. Swimming was a secondary preoccupation but it gradually gained ground, accommodated in increasingly elaborate Victorian baths.
One high point was the Charing Cross floating bath of 1875 moored on the Thames at Hungerford Bridge. Engravings of the time show moustachioed bathers in chastely voluminous trunks (inevitably, it was men only), gliding around a water-filled barge enclosed by a greenhouse-like structure. Its backers hoped it would be the first in a series of floating baths along the Thames, but it eventually closed in 1884. London still awaits a modern floating lido, unlike Paris, which has the Piscine Joséphine Baker on the Seine.
Throughout the Victorian era, social stratification was rigidly enforced, with first- and second-class baths catering for their respective constituencies. Women were generally relegated to laundry duties and rarely had the opportunity to learn to swim. The catastrophic sinking of the pleasure cruiser Princess Alice in the Thames in 1878 pointed up this stark, existential inequality. More than 600 people drowned, most of them female passengers, who would have been non-swimmers, dragged under by their heavy clothing.
Underscored by social and economic change, the development of the swimming pool was bound up with urbanisation, progressive reform and the emergence of popular recreation. The rise of mixed bathing and the sexualisation of public culture added a further libidinous frisson. By the time the former war artist Fortunino Matania designed a poster for Southport lido in 1925, depicting long-limbed bathers enjoying sunlit seaside delights, Victorian prudery and drudgery were a distant memory. Ice-cream coloured lidos peppered the English coast, among them Saltdean and Plymouth’s Tinside. A drawing showing the interior of Wembley’s Empire Pool, which opened in 1934 and hosted the 1948 Olympics, evokes a similarly gilded and carefree milieu, featuring spectators in tuxedos and gowns.
The exigencies of postwar reconstruction brought the pool back down to earth. Municipal provision and a spirit of egalitarianism flourished, with nearly 200 public baths being built between 1960 and 70. Dollan baths in East Kilbride is typical of the time, its humpback profile inspired by Japanese modernist Kenzo Tange’s National Gymnasium for the 1964 Tokyo Olympics.
Today, Britain’s public swimming pools must contend with the corrosive impact of local authority budget cuts and the challenge of maintaining ageing buildings. Bon Accord Baths, my watery alma mater, closed in 2008, and has since languished while Aberdeen city council tries to figure out what to do with it. It’s currently on Historic Environment Scotland’s Buildings at Risk Register, and its future is far from assured. As Raymond Chandler pithily observed in The Long Goodbye “nothing ever looks emptier than an empty swimming pool”.
But, as the RIBA display shows, more optimistic narratives also prevail. Jubilee Pool in Penzance has just reopened following a refurbishment that will harness geothermal energy to heat part of its pool, enabling all-year-round use. Intended to attract tourists, while also improving things for residents, the remodelling by Scott Whitby Studio includes an expanded cafe, bar and new community hall. Originally designed by borough engineer Captain Frank Latham, Jubilee Pool is a tour de force of seaside art deco, its gleaming white structure resembling an ocean liner anchored at the extreme end of England.
As the largest seawater lido in the country, Jubilee Pool is powerfully emblematic of a belief in modernity and the benefits of public recreation. “There can hardly be any better form of bodily exercise than swimming,” proclaimed the mayor of Penzance at its opening in 1935. Paul Valéry put it another way. “It seems to me that I discover and recognise myself when I return to this universal element,” he wrote. “To plunge into water… this is for me a delight only comparable to love.”
● Into the Blue: The Origin and Revival of Pools, Swimming Baths and Lidos, Victoria & Albert Museum, London, runs 20 July to 19 April
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