Swimming and swimming pools

I recently learnt about an exciting outdoor swimming pool I can try out in London. Not only is the London Fields Lido heated, but, at 50 metres, it is Olympic sized! With a bit of investigation, I learnt that the 1930s lido was closed for over 20 years before reopening in 2006, thanks to pressure from the community. Another impressive London pool is the 100 year old Kentish Town Baths which I joined a petition to save back in 2005, and is now thankfully undergoing renovation, not destruction. The London Pools Campaign lists 25 pools which are either closed or at risk of closure in London, and of course this is an issue which extends far beyond the capital. Swimming is a form of exercise that is excellent for burning calories, strengthening muscles and, being low impact, is ideal for people such as pregnant women and those with injuries. The government is clamouring to tackle obesity and get more people more active more often, so why are so many pools at risk of closure?

My local pub, The Swimmer at the Grafton Arms, is something of a shrine to the aesthetics of swimming, with a fine collection of images of old swimming pools (such as a floating pool on the River Thames!), a diagram of about 15 strokes which predate the invention of the front crawl, and photos of bathing suit-clad men, and women in fancy swimming hats. I wonder if swimming has made it into academic literature, as a topic which crosses the disciplines of social history, the sociology of leisure and policy studies?

I searched for ’swimming’ in IBSS and got a surprising 120 hits. I quickly realised that the search was picking up on the metaphorical use of the word ’swimming’ in the title field, generating results like ‘Swimming with sharks: technology ventures, defense mechanisms, and corporate relationships’. Amending my search to ’swimming pools’ got me 17 bona fide results, and searching for ’swimming’ but limiting this to the Subject field gave me 23 records which had been tagged with the keyword ’swimming’ by IBSS’s team of indexer/editors. This seems to be a good number of results, showing that swimming has at least a minor presence in the academic world.

I found lots of really interesting articles on the development of swimming by Christopher Love, who is clearly the main academic working on this topic. Swimming also seems to be a pet topic of The International Journal of the History of Sport.  In ‘An overview of the development of swimming in England, c.1750-1918′ Love (2007) asserts that the activity can be dated back to the mid-18th century when public school boys splashed around in “swimming holes”. By the late 19th century, swimming had become a more common recreational pursuit. In ‘Local aquatic empires: the municipal provision of swimming pools in England, 1828-1918′ , I learnt that the first municipal swimming pool was the St George’s Baths, Liverpool, built in 1828. This was followed by many pools nationally, and swimming came to be seen as something that local authorities should encourage because of its benefits to health and hygiene. In fact, an image at my local pub corroborates the link between cleanliness and swimming: the Hornsey Road Baths was also a laundry!

My search on IBSS shows me that swimming has sparked academic interest on both sides of the Atlantic. From grimy, utilitarian municipal pools to glamorous photographs of swimmers in days gone by, the idea of swimming seems to provoke a reaction in many. Three books about swimming in the Americas catch my eye. Kossuth (2005) looks at the development of municipal pools in Canada in the Victorian age. Van Leuven’s (1999) The springboard in the pond: an intimate history of the swimming pool discusses American swimming pools from the perspective of modernism, and also links swimming to an American ‘obsession’ with recreation and health. Wiltse’s (2007) Contested waters: a social history of swimming pools in America takes a class, race and body angle. The race perspective is shown in the book’s cover which is adapted from an advert for swimming classes in New York from the 1940s.

In ‘The future of swimming’, a chapter in Statistical Thinking in Sports (2007), Ray Stefani discusses swimming from a competitive athletics perspective. It seems likely that the 2012 Olympics will have some impact in boosting the protection of swimming in London. The new Aquatics Centre will have two 50 metre and one 25 metre pools. A look at the architecture of the Kentish Town Baths shows how grand swimming pools once were: . I hope that new pools are treated the same level of respect in future, and that planners start to see the beauty and historical value of old pools.