health and fitness: An outdoor swimming tour of London

jeudi 23 juillet 2015

An outdoor swimming tour of London – top 10 lidos and ponds

There’s no better way to escape the stresses of city life than to go for an outdoor swim. London has some historic lidos and even the odd truly beautiful swimming pond, as our writer discovers as she visits 10 of them in a weekend

The swimmer: a journey across London’s ponds and lidos – in pictures
Missed out your favourite London lido? Tip one in the comments below

London may have a river running through it but it is not a city of outdoor swimmers. It wasn’t always so. In Downstream, Caitlin Davies documents the history of swimming in the Thames over 400 years – including numerous examples of famous swimmers (Charles Dickens, Stanley Spencer, actor Margaret Rutherford), as well as little-known Victorian women who broke taboos and records in the mid-1800s. By the 1930s, there were bathing houses, floating baths and beaches on the river, and numerous lidos across the capital. The Thames is now deemed too dangerous to swim in downstream of Putney, and there are just 17 lidos and outdoor pools in London. But the tide is turning. Publicity for the proposed Thames baths and this summer’s opening of Kings Cross Pond have rekindled an interest in open-air swimming in the heart of the city. These two ponds may well inspire other similar projects. In the meantime, there’s been a rise in the number of people using the capital’s lidos, and membership of the Outdoor Swimming Society has risen from 300 in 2008 to 25,000 at the time of writing. Perhaps it’s an exaggeration to say we are on the verge of a second golden era of swimming but there’s no doubt that more of us are taking to the water.