Making waves: Why cities need more space for outdoor swimming

In the office, this has got us talking about outdoor swimming: who does it, how they do it, and what exactly it means for the built environment.

For some, lidos were connected with nostalgia: childhood memories of swimming lessons and long afternoons by the water at the Parliament Hill and Brockwell Park lidos. Others are newer converts, finding community at Hampstead Heath and Beckenham Place Park ponds, family days out at Hampton Pool, or relief from hot summer days at Tooting Bec lido – the UK’s largest freshwater open air swimming pool – or Charlton’s heated alternative. Inevitably, there were some debates around merits of cold water versus heated, with the (apparently) refreshing ritual of the cold plunge pitted against the ability to swim outdoors all year round.

What quickly became apparent was that outdoor pools are infrastructure not just for exercise, but also for community, learning and cooling – something that will only become more important as we look ahead to hotter summers.

From London Zoo’s penguin pool – by some accounts London’s most architecturally noteworthy outdoor pool, and arguably wasted on the penguins – to Tooting Bec lido, the city’s oldest and turning 120 this summer, London’s swimming spaces have long shaped the social, civic and architectural life of the city.

Historically rooted in the Victorian public baths movement and the municipal lido boom of the 1930s, public outdoor swimming pools occupy an unusually democratic place in Britain’s leisure landscape: relatively affordable, publicly accessible and often managed around the needs of local communities.

If it seems like more people are swimming outdoors, the numbers back this up: participation across the UK more than doubled between 2016-17 and 2023-24. Unfortunately, lidos and outdoor pools are now more than ever the victims of their own success, with available slots hard to find, pools overcrowded and, recently, dozens of rogue swimmers disturbing nesting birds at Hampstead Heath.

The obvious task for the built environment is to build more outdoor pools, integrating blue space alongside green space when thinking about new developments or redevelopments. This is not always an easy task, especially in dense urban environments like central London. There are, however, examples to follow. We can look (literally) to our neighbour Oasis, which has shifted forms through the centuries from a Victorian washhouse to a wartime water tank, adapting to changing civic needs before taking its current form as an open-air pool run by Camden Council. There are newer examples too: Canary Wharf Sea Lanes, a brand new Olympic-sized lido is opening this summer in east London, while Royal Victoria Dock in east London is offering free outdoor bathing again this year with its Summer Splash programme.

More broadly, the public conversation around bathing in rivers, ponds and the sea is still evolving, with 13 new bathing sites opening across England last month and the conversation around pollution and monitoring ongoing.

Ultimately, the popularity of swimming outdoors is still far ahead of the infrastructure and systems designed to protect our blue spaces. As it continues to grow more popular and our summer temperatures rise, the question of outdoor swimming spaces will become ever more important for developers, planners and councils.