In the mid-1800s, rooms at the Grand Brighton Hotel had three taps: hot, cold and sea water. At that time, the ocean was considered a tonic for all diseases: leprosy, rickets, bronchitis – even cancer and “women’s complaints”. Britons flocked to the coast not only to eat ice cream and enjoy the sun, but also to get the “water cure”. Hospitals and sanatoriums by the sea, as Royal Victoria Hospital in Bournemouth, offered and promoted sea bathing. Throughout the 19th century, lidos and tide pools were built across the country in an effort to bring safe swimming and salty vitality to all.
If you had shown Victorian bathers this week’s weather forecast, with temperatures forecast to reach 39˚C, they would have expected us to head straight for the lido. But most of those once bustling baths are now car parks, or worse. There are fewer places to swim than ever, leading to tragedies when people swim in unmonitored or unsafe places outside despair. Somehow, once Britain began to warm the world’s climate, she forgot the best way she knew, physically and spiritually, to cool off.
One of the most impressive constructions was Clifton Baths in Margate, Kent, built in 1824. The large structure included male and female bathing pools, numerous hot baths and later an indoor swimming pool. Today, the city’s orange-yellow LIDO sign still symbolizes local goods, but the original stands on a wasteland of dirt and broken glass, and you’re more likely to see people taking drugs than water cures in the remains of its tilework. Margate was also home to the Royal Sea Bathing Hospital, where tuberculosis patients went for treatment. The building is now a residence, permanently marked with the words “BALLING DET”.
Sea bathing, where still possible, maintains a large population of ardent devotees. Just down the road from the derelict lido is the Walpole Bay tidal pool, the largest of its kind in the UK. If you visit in any season and time it with the tide, you’re likely to find a few swimmers enjoying the water. One crisp December morning, I was followed by ten women wearing fluffy winter hats, as if they could stop the cramps in their hands and feet.
Often these pools are maintained by community members. Across the country, there are groups working tirelessly not only to preserve this part of our history, but to ensure that current and future generations can enjoy it as well. Such a group is Bude Sea Pool Friendswho look after a pool in Cornwall. Their communications manager, Jodie Harper, learned to swim at a very young age and finds herself always coming back to the sport, but doesn’t feel confident swimming in open water. Bude gives her the best of both worlds, “the experience of being at sea without any worry about waves or currents.”
The sea pool is her favorite place for Harper and she believes that access to swimming is essential for everyone. “As an island nation with many rivers, canals and lakes, learning to swim and being comfortable in the water can save lives,” she says. “It’s a fantastic form of exercise that supports physical and mental wellbeing and, in a country dealing with increasing inactivity and pressure on the NHS, access to pools and safe outdoor swimming spaces plays a significant role in keeping people active.” Harper also mentions the strong social networks that emerge around outdoor and cold water swimming. “These groups provide not only the benefits of swimming itself, but also friendship, support and a sense of belonging…we hear so many stories of how joining a swimming group has helped people build confidence, connect with others and improve their overall well-being.”
All of them explorative shows that swimming, and in particular bathing in the sea, has a positive impact on mental and physical health. To swim in England Research shows that 6.81 million people swim outdoors each year, including 2.45 million in open water. Polls of outdoor swimmers return the same words over and over again: “community,” “nervous system,” and “mental health.” Hana Walker-Brown is a documentary filmmaker currently working on people’s relationships with water. “There was something so liberating and ceremonial about a bunch of screaming women getting into freezing cold water together to start the year and I was drawn in,” she says. Now, Walker-Brown swims in the sea when she can and goes to London during the winter. Swimming in cold water helps to calm her mind: “I love the ritual of it as much as the swimming itself: the walk in the water, the weather, the conversations afterwards, the feeling of re-entering the world a little rearranged.”
Walker-Brown believes access to outdoor swimming should be a universal right in Britain. “So many people experience profound physical and mental benefits from being in open water, but access in the UK is often limited by pollution, privatisation, geography, class or safety concerns,” she says. “Clean waterways and safe swimming spaces are as much a public health issue as an environmental issue.” Walker-Brown had canceled the scheduled grades waste water landfills in the water. “Outdoor swimming reconnects people with the natural world in an intimate way. Once you’ve been swimming regularly in a river or in the sea, environmental degradation ceases to be abstract. You feel it personally and feel a greater sense of care and responsibility.”
Neglecting public docks and tidal pools is costing us important parts of our history. Many of these sites were historically significant structures as well as community spaces. of Lost Lido the project tracks dozens of outdoor pools across the country that have now either been filled in, neglected or reused. Keeping pools open and maintained, even those that seem relatively low maintenance, is a constant battle.
Lack of care for existing pools and outdoor swimming areas can be attributed to a number of things. Michael Wooda co-founder at Future Lidos, says “There’s always been a public movement to love them, but it’s never been linked to anyone having any power to make decisions about leisure.” His research shows that people would like to have more outdoor swimming spaces across the country and that they would create healthier communities and perhaps even tourism. However, for private investors, there is little money to be made. “If you wanted to invest in your free time, you would go and build a Padel court.”
However, in recent years there has been a promising flood of new facilities. In Sussex alone, the recent opening of Sea Lanes and the restoration of Saltdean Lido just a few miles apart shows the promise of increasing access to outdoor swimming. The team behind Brighton’s Sea Lanes have opened an open water swimming venue Canary Whorrf on June 19, providing access to more people in the city.
Medicine has come a long way since the days when we believed that salt water could cure serious ailments. Perhaps we will never return to the golden age of water cures, with sea-bathing hospitals and third-party taps. But as the country and the world heat up, access to safe swimming may seem more imperative than ever.
(Further reading: English football is complaining)
