Waterbiography

FOREST HILL POOLS

Dartmouth Road, Forest Hill, SE23 3HZ

Tel: 020 8291 8730

Pros: It’s a brand new pool

Cons: I’ll admit, I’m hard pushed to find one. I could nit pick, it would be a strange day if I didn’t. I could moan about Forest Hill, but why, when it also has the Horniman Museum. You're never too old to snigger about that. 

(Pics: before and after. When I find a better 'after' pic, I'll change it.) 

I started my life in London living in a shared flat in Forest Hill, found through an ad in the Guardian. Then, my life was full of smokers and dopers and wannabe actors, it was odds and sods and cash-in-hand and slow trains to London Bridge. I would have no more gone for a swim than I would have nailed my foot to the floor.  Now I still live in a shared house but they’re my family, my life is full of school runs and jokers and dog walkers, and I’m coming back to Forest Hill Pool for a swim with a friend who just did an Ironman race*. It’s not always ‘funny’, how life turns out, but it is certainly unexpected.

And if sometimes life hands me little bits of synchronicity, I’d be remiss to ignore them; they’re writerly flavour. This was today’s: I moved to Forest Hill in the month that my father was dying. I was 21, graduating from uni. My dad, generally a classical man, had embraced Pink Floyd’s Dark Side of the Moon, and Focus - he played the Focus LP over and over and over.** And on my car radio on the journey here? A Focus track, ‘Sylvia’. (I put up a link so you could hear what was inflicted on me throughout my formative years.) I knew every breath of it, it was imprinted somewhere beyond my control, I couldn’t have forgotten it if I’d tried. If my life was a film, that in the car, then, was the moment for a flashback.

A lido? In Crouch End?

NB: The details for this pool are now changed. Please see the comment at the bottom for an updated link. 

CROUCH END LIDO

Park Road Leisure Centre


Park Road


Hornsey
 N8 8JN

020 8341 3567

Added bonus:  The pool website says that Simon Pegg and David Tennant live in Crouch End. Star-spotting. Hold me back. (SEE NOTE) 

Negative points: Seasonal. 

This review will mine the gap between ‘hidden gem’ and ‘never heard of it’.

I won’t ask this question to the queue stretching along the road on a beautiful summer day, but - how come so few people I know who swim in lidos have swum in this lido? Even my friends Wendy and John, who live three yards away, haven't swum in it - mind you, they’re not a litmus test, they’re private pool people. Hmm. I know. *purses lips, mean little nod.* It’s no more off the beaten track than, say, Uxbridge (dodges while people from Crouch End throw things) and it can’t be the North/South divide, because I've swum in Parliament Hill Lido.  Somehow, this one has slipped off my lido radar. Yours too?

There is a long list of negatives that might keep this pool out of ‘hidden gem’ category.  I’ve discounted ones that aren’t consistent (the cold, grey windy day, and the woman on the front desk whose Customer Service badge had disappeared up her own arse) and there’s still quite a list:

-  We had to yell to get the lido gate open.

-  The outdoor table and chair sets: four red moulded-plastic chairs bolted to tables - simultaneously ugly AND uncomfortable AND impossible to get in and out of.  (SEE NOTE)

-  Tiny changing rooms that look like festival loos. Too narrow to bend your elbows in, so you have to change straight-armed. Try it.

-  A naff sub-Disney mural on the (closed) snack booth, from which I extrapolated that the snacks would also be shit. If I’m wrong, I’ll amend this. (SEE NOTE)

-  Decoration: Made me think of Canvey Island in the 70s.  I've never been to Canvey Island but I have seen the 70s in magazines....(one of those things is not quite true). All the signs, lifeguard metal chairs etc in various old reds, mostly rusting or cracking.

- Signs hammered into the strip of lawn, like at a bad Butlins.

-  Manky conifers in half-barrels.

-  Suburban hedging. If Mike Leigh wrote a play about a lido.

-  The building: One long ugly wall that looked as if it was made of shipping containers. Might work on a docklands industrial estate, less good here. You want your pool to look like the kind of place where Guy Ritchie could drive through any moment with shoo’ers, and do random violence? 

-   Showers are outside, so you have to keep your cossie on.

And the piece de resistance for me - 

-  The fountain with a banner exhorting people to throw a penny in, for the defibrillator fund.  And because the people who swim here (myself now included) would obviously scrabble meanly for pennies in a fountain with no care for the heart conditions of others, it has an ugly cordon round it, the kind they use to keep people back on a demo, but painted in cheap white paint to soften the effect, and failing to. (SEE NOTE) 

    

The swim certainly has a lot of overcoming to do.  BUT (there had to be a but) sometimes, even if you have a long list of negatives, the overall result is positive. I get in via some ruddy tile steps that look slippy;  the unpretentious blue is familiar. The pool is 50m and the decision was made a few years back to warm the water (not heat it) but so minimally I could definitely feel the chill as I got in. ‘Ooh, bit cold’ I say as I reach waist deep. ‘You don’t say’ grumbled husband. The normal dirt on the bottom had been ‘enhanced’ by the wind, which had dumped half an autumn’s worth of dead leaves and blossomy bits, lying now in swirl and eddy patterns. The pool is a shallow at both ends and deeper in the middle, and I like that, it works. (All ends are equal, it's a utopian lido.) It played a little trick on my swimming brain: I didn’t feel, as I got tired, that I was schlepping uphill to the deep end, and back downhill. A slight mental recalibration, a tiny tilt in perception, and the swim feels like cycling on the flat. None of the hard work going up, but none of the freewheeling either; just regular going along.

And the water. It all comes down to the water. The water feels light, clean, clear. The warmth doesn’t make it feel ‘mulled’, but it takes that sharp edge off that can get you out of the pool before you want to.  As with all seasonal lidos, it definitely helped that there were only three other swimmers, one of whom I’m married to. I decided on my personal line, as did the others, and we stuck to them. As I pushed off and looked ahead, underwater, I could see no legs ahead, just my own clear way to the other end, well, that was lovely.

I got out smiling. The water wins it, trumping my (ahem) design sensibilities. There’s nothing cool, or trendy, or nicely put together. It could realistically be described as a bit of a dump. But I got out smiling. And the lifeguard smiled back.

NB: There are indoor pools on this site, and normally I’d have tried them. I didn’t, partly because there’s a whole separate entrance procedure, so it’s not a straight swap from one to t’other.  And in the end, there are far fewer lidos than indoor pools so I’m going to say it was in the interests of balance, rather than the lure of pavlova at Wendy and John’s.

NOTE: Added on 7th Sept 2012: David Tennant has moved. Other famous people have been bought in to fill the vortex but none succesfully, thus far. The cordon round the fountain is still up, but the defibrillator has obviously been bought, so feel free to have a heart attack in Crouch End safe in the knowledge. However: the horrible furniture is gone! In its place are some whicka-lite chairs. The mural is also gone! I feel SO POWERFUL!  I am woman, hear me roar (if that's OK?). 

Blows own very small trumpet

Now* available in book form.

I'm pleased to tell you I've been commissioned by Aurum Press to write a book – Swimming London – about the history of the gerbil as a family pet.

D’oh. JAPES! Always with the japes. Never gets tiresome, does it...

Swimming London will be a guide to the 50 best swimming places in London. It’ll be published in 2014 because swimming takes AGES the way I do it, and finding good places takes even longer; this blog is testimony to that. It’ll be different from the blog, because, er, books are different from the interwebs. Different in tone, too: for a start it'll be positive, which is going to be a fucking nightmare for me, and with no swearing, ditto. 

I’m currently compiling the list of pools -  some of the places will be very familiar to regular readers and swimmers. The usual suspects. But I want to cast my net wide, as wide as within the M25; but there are over 280 public pools alone in London, and then there's lakes, river swims, hotels, clubs, great gym pools etc -  so I could do with some help. I would love to hear recommendations, if you know somewhere excellent that might not be on my radar, or have good reason to nominate your local pool.

While ‘it’s not shit!’ would be a cause for major celebration on this blog, it isn’t a strong enough reason for a pool to be in the top 50. But it would be great to document all the hidden gems out there; I’m sure there are loads. If you can help me find them, that would be SO GREAT. THANKS! 

*soon. Ish. Soonish available in book form. 

(The photo, I hear you all clamour. Who IS that amazing diver in the photo? It's me! doing my third ever dive in Majorca, this June. Since then it's all been downhill in the diving department. I have peaked at dive no. 3.  Still, no one took any pics of the shit dives, they took a pic of the good dive, so please, let this be your abiding image of me.) 

swimmingroundedinburgh

or: What I did on my holiday.

For six days this summer, I went to Embra to embrace (ooooh she’s clever) the festival. I say Embra as if I was Irvine Welsh. It probably makes me look like a knob, but I’ll live.  I love this city. I’ve only ever had good times here, in and out of festival time. I’ve had love, fun, shouting, dancing, happy crying, and a lot of lager shandies. I’ve stayed up all night and stayed in bed all day. The only thing I’ve never done here before is heroin. NO NO, I meant ‘go swimming’. I’ve never gone swimming here.  It was mentioning Irvine Welsh made me think of heroin. I blame him. Let’s never mention heroin again.

ANYWAY. Heroi … SWIMMING. (Mutters darkly: ‘focus woman. Focus’.) I was mid-festival, mid-Olympics and there was actual warmth from the sun, so most of my time was spent watching shows, sobbing at amazing sports people or sitting in cafés saying obnoxiously loudly ‘oh my gosh in all my days I’ve never been warm outside in Edinburgh before’ until frankly, if I'd heard me I would have stabbed me with a little traditional knife from down my sock. In the inbetween bits, I managed three pools which come on, is not bad.

The first was Warrender Swim Centre above (formerly known as Warrender Baths, which tells you plenty about its provenance) just up the road from where we were staying. I loved being piped across the Meadows by a practising band, though I don’t think they’re a fixture. This part of the city is huge houses and greenery but down one wide residential road we came to a low red-brick Victorian building with a twiddly stepped gable and little steeples. It was cute.  Up the steps and through the glazed doors to the 25m pool and at first sight – it is fabulous. Beautifully restored in 2005, look at that ceiling! At the other end, there's a beautiful tiled arch. Oh, even the colours I love and blimey those Victorian builders had a good sense of style. As the picture  shows it has changing cubicles down each side, though they’re plastic now rather than the original wood. There are little round steps to get in at each corner, and it curls up at the edges too, so it feels like swimming in an old quilted bag. It’s very hot, the water’s 29degrees. You have to shower in your costume, and as it turns out, this is the same in the other two pools.

The second pool is modern: The Royal Commonwealth Pool. I’ve arranged to swim with someone I met off Twitter, which sounds like one of those things we warn our children against. Fortunately, I’m a grown up and I’ve done a full impact self defence course (I’ll tell you about that one day. Amazing) so I had no qualms waiting for @Shequeen – apart from one. You know that thing when you’re waiting for someone, you spot each other from miles off and wave, then you have to stand awkwardly, waving a bit more, grinning, looking at a very interesting cloud, maybe you start walking towards them or not, do you? you're not sure, they start to hurry, it’s a bit … awkward. I was worried about that. Oh, and you know when you have an online conversation and people say ‘oh we must meet’ and you think ‘CHRIST. I’ll be found out. This version of me is MUCH better than the real thing’.  That, also. Fortunately Shelagh just appeared, and had no intention of abducting me, so I didn't need to employ that trick where you split someone's nose in half via the nostrils. And I ensured I wasn't dull in real life by only speaking in sentences of less than 140 characters so it was like I was on TwitterLive. Threw in the odd hashtag, too. 

This pool is also fabulous. Normally 50m, today it was split and there was a seniors aquafit class, things that would normally ENRAGE me. Today, look at me, on holiday from rage, you could have added a nursery swimming lesson to the mix and I'd have grinned and with a jaunty wave said 'hey kids, jump in, the water's lovely!" The design is typical contemporary pool school:  lots of smooth dark wood, walls of glass, a beautiful diving area and masses of space, including in the water. The changing area is a village and look at me some more! So busy swopping knitting patterns with the lovely @shequeen that I don’t even complain! And I start using too many exclamation marks! Maybe I’m … (ohmygod) happy!

For the third pool I went back to the old, to a pool someone told me was ‘quirky’, and it was. Glenogle Swim Centre on the other side of town,  cottages and bridges and down all the hill and very sweet, then you come face to face with a huge red building that puts it all in the shade. It’s another saved Baths and bloody hell, I take my swimming hat off to the folk of this city who have campaigned to keep their glorious Baths heritage. Again, this is a total treat. On the way in, the tills were not working so they said ‘pay on your way out’, trusting that I would. I did. The stairs up are in a yellow green brown chunky brick Victorian tile, and again, a stunning pool with cubicles down the side and shared ‘no nudity’ showers. This gorgeous sun we're experiencing shining right in the beautiful skylight windows. We (me and my daughter) swim on our own until two little scamps join us. We are seriously practising our new breaststroke learned off the telly, heads bobbing right up there, and they are mostly finding us amusing. And when we do some diving practice, they get out to show us how it's done in that rather lovely loose way that scamps have, as opposed to my rather nervous and laboured thigh-stinging slaps.

If I’d had more time, I’d have gone to Portobello Baths, and for a sea swim there. But if I’d had more time I’d also have undoubtedly found some pools I hated, so let’s be glad I stopped there, eh.

But I’ve learned things.  Edinburghers are never naked in their public swimming facilities, unless it's behind locked cubicle doors. They have machines to spin your costume dry, I like those. And *swaying gently to a guitar-picking hippy* I’ve learned that on holiday, I’m a pushover. In my real life, I would have picked the 50m serious training Commonwealth Pool every day. In holiday mode, I LOVED those beautiful Victorian pools. In a contest of head v heart, heart won. It never does. Happy times.

(On the train home, I discovered that Ian Thorpe was giving swim tips at Tooting Lido. Rage returned: IT’S SO UNFAIR! I’VE PUT IN THE HOURS IN THAT POOL. And when I explained to my son that Thorpedo was at the pool, his raised eyebrow and questioning 'You WHAT?’ told me that Ian Thorpe needs to work on getting a new nickname.)

CHARLTON HESTON MEMORIAL POOL

CHARLTON LIDO

Hornfair Park, Shooters Hill Road

London SE18 4LX

There’s no phone number. You have to email better.org.uk if you have a query or if you want to book in advance. Yes, book in advance, you read that right; it seems odd to me. 

It’s a little known fact that Charlton was named after Charlton Heston, hence the large golden chariot statue in the shopping centre, and their on-going commitment to gun crime,  or ‘homage crime’ as they call it round there.

Ha ha. Obviously that’s a joke. They don’t have a shopping centre in Charlton.

It’s another bloody miserable summer’s day in London, the grey skies pissing endless down on us as we wend our way through the traffic of South East London. ‘We’ is me and Kate, and Kate is lovely Kate from Tooting Lido* whose ability to withstand cold water combined with superb baking skills make her a total catch. That's all my priorities, right there. Oh yea, and she’s completely lovely, which counts too, I hear. (She's already caught, in case you were wondering and also, I'm not running some kind of water/cake-related dating service, however good an idea that is.) We hadn’t, see above, booked in advance. The pool is newly re-opened but we felt that the weather - great weather for swimming outdoors actually - would probably put most fools off.  Kate, being efficient, had looked at the booking system and seen there were plenty of spaces left, so we felt able to risk in. She did try to explain the system to me but as I can’t really see the point of it  I didn’t listen very intently; she works with children  so I think she recognised that 'I stopped listening look. (I'm sure there is a point to the online booking service, if Better** feel like adding a comment?)

Everything but.

SOUTHGATE LEISURE CENTRE

Winchmore Hill Road, Southgate, London N14 6AD

020 8882 7963

Sometimes, it's about everything but the pool. This is one of those times.  

Today, people, I will be attempting a very difficult trick. It is extremely dangerous and I have been training for it for years. Highly skilled personnel are standing by ready to assist me, should my trick fail. Do not try this at home. Today *drum roll*

I will be diving off the top board wearing only a variety of sandwich spreads painted on my body in an edible replica of the Olympic logo.

Don’t worry! It’s a joke! *serious face* I don’t have official permission to replicate the Olympic logo. 

But today, actually, I am doing something a little different. I would call this a ‘blog mash-up’ if using that phrase didn’t make me sound like a middle-aged* Glee fan in a retro Adidas tracksuit who had reluctantly torn herself away from Fifty Shades to get to Pop Choir on time. But I am swimming with another blogger, writer Wendy Lee, who has an eversoslightly different perspective on swimming, and her take on our experience is here. Not so much a mash-up, more a friendly collision. 

BOGOFF

Or: In Which It Turns Out I’m An Utter Arse

BRITTANIA LEISURE CENTRE

40 Hyde Rd London N1 5GU

020 7729 4485

and then... 

 

KING’S HALL LEISURE CENTRE

39 Lower Clapton Road, London E5 0NU

020 8985 2158

This is quite long. Settle yourselves in.

I know about hipsters.  I have sat amongst them admiringly as they drank their old skool tea and listened to them chitter-chatter in gentle mellifluous tones about open access functionality and creative end-use digitality; I’ve watched them ungroom each other, watched how they raise their young. (They mostly don’t have young, but those that do raise them very hipsterishly, a beautiful if randomly dressed sight.) I’m in awe of the hipster, so it’s surprising that I haven’t been to this pool before, being as it’s in the middle of hipster Hoxton. (Try saying that.) I’m glad I’m not one though, it looks hard work and a bit self conscious.  I couldn’t be, anyway, as I have peanut butter on my skinny jeans. Sad face.

For me, the important question has always been: what does a hipster wear for swimming? I glide up to the Brittania leisure centre in eager anticipation. My quest for this answer will at last be found. Alas. It is not to be.