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GREENWICH ARCHES
80 Trafalgar Road, London SE10 9UX
020 8317 5000
I'm aware the pic is useless. There are no pics of the interior. Sorry.
You’d think, would you
not, that I would be right at home here. Huge banners float from every lamppost
declaring this to be ROYAL GREENWICH and I’m from a Royal Town myself – Sutton
Coldfield, as you asked - so it should somehow be in my blood. But in the same way that
Sutton Coldfield doesn’t want to be part of Birmingham, I don’t want to be part
of Sutton Coldfield, even though they have what I consider to be the best park
in the country. I don’t think I’d be welcome anyway; they have their full quota
of Labour voter and don’t want me there doubling it.
For anecdotal purposes I
should pretend that I’d coincided my trip with the Queen’s visit to the new
Cutty Sark; it could have given the blog an extra royal spin, which it’s sorely
lacked to date. But it was an accident. The Queen had ‘battled
through’ the rain according to my car radio (so brave), and as I battled past, I
could see a gathering of huge corporate umbrellas poking out the eyes of the
less fortunate, so metaphorical are they.
Some iconic buildings on
the way: the Naval College, the fab Observatory, the Noodle Box – but around
the corner from these historic slabs the landscape goes comparatively
downbeat. It has a very distinct look to it, low-lying under a big bowl sky
that’s punctured by huge brick towers; this area bears its labour scars in the
architecture of old riverside industries. If you go up high, you’d see for
miles, and the hill right by the Observatory gives you that chance; I urge you
to try it, to get some perspective, and to look down on all the royal and
military buildings in the way they look down on you.
Peeling the massive chip
off my shoulder before it drowns me, I get to the pool and go and change. On TV
recently, Jo Brand called Streatham a shit hole, and this is the Streatham of
changing rooms. The few cubicles have doors hanging off their hinges, the
‘bench’ is a shallow tiled ledge not as deep as my foot is long, so impossible
to sit on; there are missing ceiling tiles, through which I keep expecting
Nikita to appear. The sink has a black faux marble surround suitable for a Russian motel in the 80s, and there are strategically placed buckets collecting
the aforementioned rain (I make a mental note not to use the hairdryer sitting
right under the drips). It’s not filthy. It’s just a small crappy mishmash of a
box. A sign on the door telling me
to wash my hands for hygiene purposes makes me chuckle with its irony.
I launch myself into the
cool water, dappled with light as a tropical pool under the shade of palm trees
might be.
The bit about dappled
light is true.
And there are actually
palm trees, painted ones, on the wall on the top balcony level of the pool.
But there the illusions
end.
My normal style is to
rail against the dirt and detritus, and I can certainly do that here. The water
has a greenish quality as if they took the juice at the bottom of someone’s
compost bin and diluted it a thousand times. (Maybe it’s homeopathic compost
water…) The concrete lining is the colour of a smoker's fag finger. The ceiling
is a horrible arch of pressed-fibre tiles, square lights and dusty grey air
vents. It’s underlit to the point of gloom. There’s a stage at one end with a
dated mural beach scene. The filter at the bottom of the pool is yicky white
plastic, dirty rust creeping round the edges and blobs of manky papery crap trying to
escape down into the cleaning system before it fully disintegrates in the
water. There are strings of flags across the pool which fail to give it a
faded fiesta feel.
But all round the edges,
there are little blue wooden changing cubicles with plastic ‘modesty curtains’
shielding the top of the doors, which are very quaint. Original square windows
with a deco-ish frame pattern line up round the top of the pool. The lifeguard
has a chair that I really want, an old-fashioned white-painted wooden affair. I
really fancy one of those chairs so I can supervise play in my garden like a
bossy gnome. It’s a 25 yard pool, and the water is chill. Somehow, against the
odds and defying logic … I QUITE LIKE IT. But only for
these interior features. It's not quite a party popper moment.
I’m the only
swimmer but not the only person in
the water. There’s a man wearing a weighted waist belt, going round and round
the pool as if on an invisible bike; I wish to report this as a new phenomenon
(do dooo de doo do). He is the third person I’ve seen doing this, in as many
months. I think it’s physiotherapy.
I kept getting in his way (accidentally). He didn’t want eye contact as
I attempted to do a ‘sorry I’m so annoying’ look, so I left it.
Back in the shower, I
had a little rant to myself, Richard Branson related. I don’t know why it
happened in this particular pool, because it applies to so many. I blame my
coincidental proximity to the Queen. I’ll précis here to avoid boring you
all. I started off thinking ‘I
can’t believe the residents of Greenwich are happy with this pool’. Then I
realised that probably most of them swam in a private gym pool, and I bet
there’s some swanky options near by. And that, people, is the way we are going
with all the stuff we should take for granted. I began to draw analogies in my
head between this pool and the NHS, and how the divide between private and public
is becoming greater, and how much that pisses me off. Councils can’t afford to
run fabulous local pools if most of the potential income is going into
someone’s personal profit pocket. We need to support our local facilities by
USING THEM, and then using our votes and voices to campaign when things are a
bit shit.
And that’s my chances of
living in Sutton Coldfield scuppered for another year.
