The Lido by Libby Page (Fiction), and some musings about lidos.

In British parlance, a lido (pronounced, weirdly, Lie-do, not as it is from the Italian word lee-do, meaning ), meaning shore, as in the Lido in Venice) is an unheated outdoor swimming pool. They are treasured parts of the communities in which they are located, and have come under increasing threat of closure over the past few decades as local governments seek to cut costs. [Another casualty of bean-counting removal of community facilities have been public libraries - which is also touched upon in this book. 

Libby Page is a journalist, and keen swimmer. This is her debut novel. It tells the story of two women who form an indelible friendship over the fight to save the un-fictitious Brockwell Lido. One is a lacking-in-confidence young journalist named Kate, whose physical appearance seems to be rather akin to that of Kate in the pic above! She is new to the Brixton area of London. She suffers panic attacks. Kate is living a lonely life in a dire share-house where no-one has any contact with anyone else. Kate meets Rosemary, an older woman in her late eighties, recently widowed, who has lived all her life in Brixton, and has  been swimming at the lido for 80 years. The lido played a large part in the love story between Rosemary and her late husband, George. 

I enjoyed the book, especially since I share many of the author's interests - swimming, saving swimming pools, libraries, cooking. 

I especially liked the depiction of the coming together to a diverse community and the tactics they used to save their pool....see my entries on Bexley Swimming Pool (linked below), which we managed to save. Like in the book, we had some great support from the local newspaper. Not QUITE so fortunate at Batemans Bay, where, despite some vigorous campaigning (see link)  we lost the outdoor 50m pool and are acquiring an indoor 25 metre pool....a regressive step in my opinion. 

Bexley pool battle ; 

The fight to save Bexley pool part 2 ;

2011 update ;

Open House Feb 2014 ;

Making submissions to Council ;

Last laps at the old pool ;

After seven years of fighting, a commencement of construction ceremony; 

Aerial shots of the development ;

We won! Bexley pool reopened; 

All my posts on Bexley Pool.

One of my favourite passages from the book describes the importance to community of such assets. 

" 'When the old library closed down no one realised the importance of what we were losing until it had gone. It was a place for learning and also a centre of our community. And it's the same with the lid. We all take it for granted and that is why it is so important. We rely on it being there for us. It is somewhere you can go for a moment to yourself, whatever your reason may be for needing that moment....

'The lido holds so many memories for us all. For children who have never been to the seaside it is their summers and their freedom. For parents it is the memory of seeing their child swim for the first time - that moment when you just have to let go and let them fly. And for me, well it is my life."

I do have to admire the cold-water swimmers of the UK. Such water temperatures as those described here, and in At The Pond which I recently read, would see me balk - possibly even in the "warm" months! I guess we are blessed in Australia. 

Another way we are blessed is that municipal pools here are plentiful. Sydney is blessed not only with dozens of 50 metre outdoor pools, but ocean and harbour pools as well. Our pools also most usually have plentiful grassed areas and facilities like barbecues are common. A friend visiting from the UK whom I took to Bexley Pool (pre-redevelopment) declared it "like a resort". Another woman I met swimming there, who migrated from China, said that her family spends thousands of dollars visiting resorts on their holidays, whereas she spends $5 going to the local pool! 

Libby Page's page. Author / Swimmer/ Optimist

In researching this post, I found this gorgeous art print of Brockwell Lido by Jenni Murphy. You can buy it from this page. 

Read more: 

BLU - Brockwell Lido Users group

A blog about swimming at the Brockwell Lido (Londonist)

Brockwell Swimmers -  a swimming club 

Henry Scott Tuke

Born 12 June 1858 in York, died 13 March 1929 in Falmouth, Cornwall.

His family moved to Falmouth in Cornwall in 1859, where his father practiced medicine. (His father specialised in psychiatry and campaigned for the humane treatment of the insane. His family were social activists.

Harry spent long summer days swimming and on the beach. He engaged in nude sea bathing throughout his life.

Tuke drew and painted from an early age, and trained at the Slade school and in Italy and Paris. He settled in Cornwall.



The Bathers 1888




Three Companions




August Blue 1893




Boys Bathing 1907




Boys Bathing 1908



Boys Bathing 1912



Ruby Gold and Malachite 1902



The Bather 1924

More about Tuke in Wikipedia.

I first "met" Tuke in the opening passage of Charles Sprawson's book Haunts of the Black Masseur:

" I learnt to swim in India, in a pool donated to the school by the Edwardian cricketer Ranjitsinhji. I was the only English boy in the school. My father was the headmaster, and Sir K.S Ranjitsinghji, the Jam Saheb of Nawanagar, its most eminent old-boy, though he was only one prince among many there. Sometimes his successor allowed us to bathe in the flooded subterranean vaults of his palace nearby, among columns that disappeared mysteriously into black water. On the walls of the palace above there still hung Tuke's paintings of bathing boys that the Jam Saheb had collected during his cricketing years in England." (Sprawson  p1-2)

Midwinter Swim at Brockwell Lido

Above: Postcard of Brockwell Lido the year after it opened (1938)

Above: Midwinter

I subscribe to a Yahoo Group called Lidos, which concentrates on British open air swimming pools (Lidos), and the battle for their preservation.

Recently I received this message:

"Hello, I thought other group members might be interested in knowing about this:

Midwinter Swim at Brockwell Lido – Come on in, the water's lovely!
Woolly hats or swimming caps essential.
Saturday December 20th
Swim from 12.00pm - 1.00pm
Activities/Refreshments from 11.45am - 1.15pm

Last year we had 73 swimmers and a water temperature of 3.2 degrees Celsius. This year we're hoping for over 100 swimmers but with the cold setting in the water temperature could drop even further so be prepared and bring a woolly hat or a swimming cap – or both!

If you don't fancy taking the plunge come and cheer the swimmers on – bring a hot towel to wrap them in and while you're waiting for them you can have a hot drink and a mince pie and learn about the history of winter swimming at Brockwell with BLU (Brockwell Lido Users).

Whether you're a swimmer or a supporter you can have a go at the art activity and customise a woolly hat for the swim or for wearing afterwards to warm up. We'll have some hats but do bring your own and any you have spare will be very much appreciated.

The entry fee is a suggested £1 minimum donation to Age Concern Lambeth; thousands of older people die each minter from cold related illnesses – help Age Concern to Fight the Freeze and keep them safe and warm.Also, at the midwinter swim BLU will be selling books and t-shirts and Elena Tognoli, August's artist in residence, will be there to launch her book "A Step-By-Step Users Manual To Brockwell Lido For People Who Don't Like Water" which she created in collaboration with Lido Users this summer, so as well as an invigorating swim you'll get the chance to do some Christmas shopping!

Hope to see some of you there... "

These people are hardier than I !! I wonder if the Bondi Icebergs and the Brockwell Icicles ever had an exchange program?

Brockwell Lido is in the London suburb of Herne Hill.

Official website of Brockwell Lido

Brockwell Lido Users Group - a group dedicated to maintaining and extending the facilities and services of the Lido.

London Pools Campaign

HAVE A GREAT SWIM!!!

Swimming in Fiction: Enid Blyton's Malory Towers

The Malory Towers series by Enid Blyton was a favourite of mine during my childhood. Darrel Rivers, the main character is a jolly-hockey-sticks all round good egg, who manages to get into a few scrapes on her inevitable journey to Head Girl. In first term, we meet most of the characters who remain throughout the series. Mary-Lou is a scardey-cat, frightened of everything: spiders, the dark, the swimming pool. The pool is a rock-hewn one, at the base of a cliff in Cornwall. Gwendoline, a particularly nasty girl doesn't like the pool either. She ducks Mary-Lou in the pool, holding Mary-Lou under too long. Darrel sees her and gives her a whack. For her troubles she is ordered out of the pool by Head Girl, Katherine. Eventually, Darrel, and best friend Sally orchestrate a near-drowing so Mary-Lou must save Darrel, and thus gain confidence. Swimming and the pool feature again in the final term, when sporty and boastful new girl Amanda, an Olympic hopeful, arrives from the burned down Trennigan Towers. Amanda has been banging on all term about going swimming in the sea rather than just the pool, and ignoring warnings about strong currents. Of course she gets into trouble and has to be saved by another girl. All that pride and a lesson hard learned! "One of the things that Darrel liked best of all was the big swimming pool down by the sea. This had been hollowed out of a stretch of rocks, so that it had a nice rocky uneven bottom. Seaweed grew at the sides, and sometimes the rocky bed of the pool felt slimy. But the sea swept into the big natural pool each day, filled it, and made lovely waves all across it. It was a sheer delight to bathe there. The coast itself was too dangerous for bathing. The tides were so strong, and no girl was allowed to swim in the open sea. But anyone was safe in the pool. One end was quite deep, and here there were diving boards and a chute, and a fine spring board for running dives." - First Term at Malory Towers (1946) The pool, and the swimming incidents have featured on the covers of various editions: In her book The Dorset Days of Enid Blyton, Vivienne Endecott discusses the Malory Towers pool: "It was a school swimming pool like no other, and countless Blyton readers have dreamt about midnight feasts on moonlit nights around its rocky perimeter. Whilst the pool itself never existed outside Enid Blyton's imagination, it is likely to have been based on two seawater pools, one in Cornwall and the other in Dorset. The Malory Towers pool was big. It was deep and had high diving boards. It even had a water chute. It had everythign that could be ebjoyed at the most fashionable of 1930s lidos. When Enid Blyton remarried in 1942 she had honeymooned in Cornwall, and it is possible that she would have seen the fantastic Jubilee Pool at Penzance that had diving boards and water chutes, and was filled with sea water." (see postcard below) "For a school to have a pool in the 30s or 40s was very unusual. Yet there was a school at Langton Matravers near Swanage that did have a pool of its own, on the rocks at the base of the cliff. Durnford Prep School had a tradition for the boys to swim naked in the sea from Dancing Ledge, but their headmaster knew that thr coast was dangerous. So he ordered that a small swimming pool be blown out of the rocks so that the boys could bathe in safety. School children and countless tourists have used the pool ever since. Enid Blyton may have swum there as well since it is only a three mile walk along the coast path from Swanage. "

In June 2008, I re-visited Dorset (where I used to live) and did the walk along the coast path from Durlston Head to Dancing Ledge. Here's some pics I took of the rock pool at Dancing Ledge mentioned above: "It would not have taken too much imagination to combine the real location of a school swimming pool that was down in the rocks and the elaborate facilities of the pool at Penzance to devise the most famous school swimming pool ever written about." Here's a more recent pic of the Penzance Lido: To my mind, however, Blyton's Malory Towers pool is more reminiscent of either this pool at Bude in Cornwall: or Westward Ho! in Devon: "Among the rocks on the southern end of Westward Ho! beach, this pool has been in existence for at least 120 years and was renovated in the spring. Local people are passionate about the pool, which the local council, like other authorities, regards it as a bit of a health and safety nightmare." From this Guardian article. or even this pool hewn into Table Rocks at Whitley Bay, in Northumberland:

Waterlog by Roger Deakin

Brilliant book, a bit of a cult
favourite; can't help but be appreciated by anyone who loves swimming. Roger Deakin was inspired by John Cheever's short story "The Swimmer', wherein a man sets out to swim home from a neighbour's party (it's all a metaphor for life's great struggle, of course - Burt Lancaster ,left, starred in the movie adaptation). Deakin sets out from his moat in Suffolk to swim through the British Isles.

Deakin's swimming is mostly open water - rivers, ponds, his own moat, the sea. As a dedicated pool swimmer, however, I was especially taken by his chapter on searching for the spas of the Malvern Hills, around Cheltenham and Buxton. None exists any longer. Killed off, it seems, by the coming of steam railways and the subsequent accessibility of the seaside.

He does have a swim in several pools along the way, notably Cheltenham's Sandford Parks Lido* , Cirencester, Jubilee pool at Penzance, the rock pool at Dancing Ledge, Dorset, Hathersage and Ingleton in Yorkshire, Highgate Ponds, The Parliament Hill and Tooting Bec Lidos in London, and the Oasis in London.

*pronounced Lie-do, rather than the Italian-correct Lee-do, from whence the British Lido, as outdoor pools are known, gets its name: The Lido of Venice).

“When you swim, you feel your body for what it mostly is – water – and it begins to move with the water around it. No wonder we feel such sympathy for beached whales; we are beached at birth ourselves. To swim is to experience how it was before you were born. Once in the water, you are immersed in an intensely private world as you were in the womb. These amniotic waters are both utterly safe and yet terrifying, for at birth anything could go wrong, and you are assailed by all kunds of forces over which you have no control. This may account for the anxieties every swimmer experiences from time to time in deep water. The swimmer experiences the terror and the bliss of being born.”

“Swimming is often enhanced by company, and sometimes by solitude. The same individual may swim for different reasons on different days. I certainly do. The joys of swimming are sometimes those of silence and solitude, sometimes of communion with nature, and sometimes the more friends who oin you, the merrier…there is also strength in numbers if your right to bathe in this or that particular mudhole is at all questioned” P. 115

Click here for extracts from Deakin about (links will be made as I make posts about them):

Cheltenham
Cirencester
Jubilee
Dancing Ledge
Hathersage
Ingleton
Highgate
Parliament Hill
Tooting Bec
Oasis

I was inspired by Deakin to think about some memorable non-pool swimming I have done in Australia, and will be making posts on :

"The Res" at Mount Macedon, Victoria
Buchan Caves pool, Victoria
The Blue and Green Pools (former quarries) at Angourie, NSW
Copi Hollow, Menindee, NSW
Blue Lake, Mount Kosciuszko, NSW
Snowy River, NSW
Thredbo River, NSW
Rocky Creek, Upper Horton, northern NSW
Hastings Cave pool, Tasmania
Toowoomba, Qld
Lake MacKenzie, Fraser Island, Queensland