Ready steady don't go

GURNELL LEISURE CENTRE

Ruislip Road, East
 Ealing


London
W13 0AL

020 8998 3241

Added bonus:  I’m struggling with this category.

Negative: Mould.

Gurnell. It’s hard to say that word with a jaunty bounce.  I wonder if the Mr and Ms Gurnells of the world fold into a depressed slump every time they introduce themselves. It suits the day; just off the A40 I spot the low grey building perfectly matching a low grey sky. I came looking for a moan and then I found a moan: why do I have to pay to park my car here? That’s crap and money-grabbing. There’s a crow watching me as I push coins into the machine. It laughs. Caws. I resist the urge to throw something at it, but more because I’m shit at throwing.

Might be a cottage, might indeed be Swiss

SWISS COTTAGE LEISURE CENTRE

Adelaide Rd,

London NW3 3NF

020 7974 2012

Added bonus: masses of other sport stuff that looks so trendy it makes you want to do it. Clever branding. Sport is FUN in NW3.

Negative points: Leisure Centre And Library. What folly. A wet book is essentially, a ruined book. They give with one hand, they take with the other.

Here’s a question that’s puzzled Londoners for centuries: what the hell IS Swiss Cottage?  a) It’s a difficult traffic junction if you’re coming into town via the M1. b) It’s a place for neutral gay sex  or c) It’s the name of a pub, but which came first, the place or Ye Olde Swiss Cottage?

I’ve arrived here on a Sunday lunchtime, in a cunning move to guarantee myself an empty pool. Ha ha, I thinks. I’m much smarter than all these lunch eaters, I thinks, as I sauntered up and joined the queue to get in. The building exterior is very impressive. This is leisuring on a major scale. The first thing you can’t miss is a huge rock-climbing wall. Have you got a tumble dryer? Because it reminded me of the thick sheet of dried fluff you get from the door filter. And of a jumper I was particularly fond of in my youth – creamy, with specks of red, blue, green. It’s indoor outdoor, the wall – with glass on the ground floor, and then a utilitiarian steel mesh up to the huge flying roof. It’s all VERY Kevin McCloud, but in a good way, where you see the unpretentious mechanics of a building, all the bits and bobs in utilitarian materials in very pleasing proportion. Chunkiness. Loving the chunkiness.

Ladies and gentlemen, I give you ...

CLAPHAM MANOR LEISURE CENTRE

141 Clapham Manor St, Clapham

London SW4 6DB

020 7627 7900

Added bonus: brand new!

Negative: No. My overwhelming gratitude for its actual existence counters any negativity (nearly).  

I’m very pleased to be reviewing this pool, because it’s been a long dry 18 months since the old beloved Clapham Manor pool shut, and some more cynical Clapham people (not me, obvs) wondered if we'd ever get a pool again, particularly as the council's initial promises that we wouldn’t be left without one were … altered substantially.  

And here I am, first day of  opening. There was a ‘soft opening’ (oo er) when my lovely swimming friend Jackie slipped in for a quick one (oh stop it) but I, being public, got in today. Everything about it is different, but I don't want this to be a comparison, I'm letting the past go (nearly).  It’s better that way, like it's better meeting a new person and not googling them beforehand (unless they have child protection issues). 

GREAT EXPECTATIONS

BARNET COPTHALL LEISURE CENTRE

Champions Way,
Hendon

London
NW4 1PX

020 8457 9900


Added bonus: A patient family.

Negative points for: cafe

My family are pretty used to traipsing round on my missions, since I wrote a tree book and made them come with me to some of the more far-reaching sites. But ‘is this still London?’ asks Teen, from the back of the car. We’re going for lunch with friends in Mill Hill, and I’ve diverted, trying to make it sound accidental that we set out an hour early and I have my swims in the boot.  I’m glad we combined the two because if I’d brought them all this way without the offer of cheesecake at the other end, it might have led to watery insurrection. 

We turn off the main road, which has been miles  of chicken shops and Bewty Barz and 24/7 Kostless supermarkets nestling under flyovers and beside horrible traffic junctions that make me screech ‘which exit which exit’ as I pass the exit we need. I’m full of Dickens today, partly because I’m mid-way through Great Expectations on TV, and partly because one of our Mill HIll friends adapted the book as a play set in India, this year.  Nearly falling off the edge of suburbia, we creep down the empty, long speed-bumped service road, high trimmed hedges hiding the flatlands of very-north London; and as the massive stock-brick block of the leisure centre looms out of the rolling rainy gloom, I think that this is some kind of alt-Dickens vision of modern existence. That if he was writing now, this place, where rural meets suburban, is where Magwitch might loom, suddenly, out of the boggy fields behind the flickering floodlights of a Texaco garage, clambering across dumped shopping trolleys and past an illegally-tethered rotten-hooved pony to find a child like Pip chucking stones at crows before someone gives him an Asbo.

(Do stop me if I turn into a wanker.)

When he says floss, I floss.

LATCHMERE LEISURE CENTRE

Burns Road, Battersea,

London SW11 5AD

020 7207 8004

Added bonus: I can cross Latchmere off my list

Negative: I realise my dentist is fallible.

I’m very obedient when it comes to my teeth, which may be explained by the fact that my dad was a dentist. My dentist now is the Action Man of the mouth, and I always do what he says. When he says floss, I floss. When he says rinse, I rinse.  When he told me it was good at the Latchmere at around 7am, I went to the Latchmere at around 7am.

I have previous with this pool; I bought my babies here many many times. This is how it would go: I would try, tongue out in concentration, to manoeuvre my tiny car into the sliver of space between two huge Battersea tractors, the effort bringing me out in a sweat; I’d lug the small happy child and various bags to the pool. Either I’d undress the child first or myself, but either way was tricky, particularly in the days before they could walk (when you had to find some way to balance them) or in the days when they could walk (when they’d try to escape and bump their heads before we’d even start). Temperature at this point: very hot. We’d head to the water. Child stands on the edge, reluctantly. I encourage. Child falls over on slippy tiles. I get cross. Child goes in. We bob around. I get very cold. I have to decide - shoulders under to keep warm, or standing up ankle deep in kid piss. Child tries the big slide but gets scared at the top. I stand there saying ‘come on! There’s children waiting! Come on! It’s not so scary. OH FOR FUCK SAKE COME DOWN THE FUCKING SLIDE.’  I look at the clock - we’ve been here for three minutes. We bob some more. I try and invent games. The games are too scary. I try and make eye contact with other bobbing mummies. They are too busy making eye contact with their own children. While my attention is elsewhere, child slides underwater, and scrabbles at my costume to get head above water.  Child cries. People stare. Child discovers they love the slide and go up and down up and down up and down a hundred times. I lie on the pool floor waiting. Time to get out!  Child won’t get out. I drag them out by one arm. One of us is crying. Temperature at this point: catastrophic. Aaaah. Fun times.

Accidentally in Croydon

THORNTON HEATH POOL

100 The High Street,Thornton Heath

London CR7 8LF

0208 689 5300

Added bonus: Near Tooting Lido (by car)

Negative: I’ve accidentally come to Croydon ... (Added bonus II: ... not by racist tram.)

I have good conversations in Tooting Lido sauna, even when I’m in there on my own (b’dum tisch). It’s strangely personal but not, sitting, limbs fire red, nylon-to-nylon with swimmers you may or may not know. When it’s packed, I worry I might meld with the person next to me in some hot elastic bonding disaster. There’s a code of practice, unwritten of course, whereby the last person to come in is offered the hottest spot in the top corner. I was in there t’other day, talking about this blog to some poor trapped cold sods, one of whom took a slow revenge by recommending Charlton Lido, which has been shut for some time, I found out. Inez, however, recommended Thornton Heath pool, the current place-to-swim for refugees from the old Streatham pool. I thought I should give it a try.

Swim clockwise round the island

ARCHWAY POOL

1 Macdonald Road,

London N19 5DD

020 7263 0613

Opening times: Definitely shut Weds mornings, which is the time I first visited.

Added bonus: if you like wallowing in ennui

Negative points: milky milky milky

Something has occurred to me (it probably occurred to some of you a while back, but I’m a bit slow). It is this: for the purposes of a blog I chose to start, I’m paying money to visit, on a weekly basis, the shit holes of this city, and then I spend time moaning about them - again, through choice. What a fucking idiot. I could stop doing this blog, but leaving it unfinished would just add a sense of bloody failure to the whole pointless escapade. And one  annoying extra about the whole process is that the worse the area the pool is in, the worse the pool. That seems to me to be the wrong way round. Shit areas should have nice pools, cool gold plated ones where you can swim in natural water and be wafted dry by gods, they deserve it as a respite from life’s rubbish.

On this wash of ennui, I return to Archway Pool. I say return, because I turned up the week before to find it shuts on Wednesday mornings and I wasn’t even allowed to peek in, because ‘the manager was there’. Obviously the manager is a gorgon, and the advice was for my own good. The outside was not promising, so I hadn’t returned with high hopes. Jaded dirty paint and a half-hearted attempt at a wavy logo on a shitty street just past a McDonalds, 80s metal doors in horrid peeling primary paint and a crappy reception, beyond which the hum of light from a big white space calls promisingly…