Chlorine After Closing

A drained swimming pool looks less abandoned than interrupted. The blue tiles still imply depth. The lane markings still point forward. Even the echo seems to be waiting for a class of children to arrive in shoes they are not allowed to wear near the water. A closed municipal baths is not quite a ruin, at least not at first. It is a public promise with the plug pulled out.

Britain's public baths were never only about leisure. The official story runs through sanitation before it reaches swimming: the Baths and Washhouses Act of 1846 encouraged local authorities to build places where people could wash themselves and their clothes. A White Rose thesis on aquatic leisure in England dates Liverpool's St George's Baths to 1828 and calls it the first indoor municipal swimming pool in England, but the later legislation gave the idea a municipal grammar. The point was comfort and health. It was also class, because many of the homes most in need of those baths did not have bathrooms of their own.

That is why these buildings carry a charge beyond nostalgia. Worlledge Associates' short history of swimming pools notes that from the 1850s hundreds of municipal pools and bath houses were built across the country, often in working-class city areas. Some were modest. Some were grand enough to make local government look almost priestly, brick and stone insisting that hygiene was part of citizenship. I don't want to over-romanticise that. Public bathing also meant discipline, queues, separate facilities, supervision, rules about what kinds of bodies belonged where. Still, there was something startling in the premise: the town owed you water.

The later pools changed the emphasis without losing the civic idea. A Guardian piece on Britain's swimming-pool culture describes Aberdeen's Bon Accord Baths as dating from 1937, with a four-tier diving platform and what it calls Scotland's deepest deep end. The same piece notes that nearly 200 public baths were built between 1960 and 1970, and that Dollan Baths in East Kilbride took its humpback profile from Kenzo Tange's 1964 Tokyo Olympics gymnasium. That detail is almost too good: a Scottish new-town pool borrowing a shape from Japanese modernism, then translating it into the Saturday smell of chlorine, coin lockers, and wet hair in winter air.

A closed municipal pool feels wrong because it was built to make private life public for an hour. Bodies, lockers, verrucas, damp towels, the smell of disinfectant, a whistle from somewhere above the water: civic intimacy was tiled, supervised, and timed. ArchDaily's account of public pools as urban spaces is useful here because it treats bathing as a social arrangement, not just a facility. Pools strip away ordinary status markers, though never perfectly, and they have also carried the uglier politics of segregation, surveillance, and exclusion. The egalitarian fantasy was always leaky.

The closures hurt because they don't remove a luxury. They remove one of the few municipal rooms where people were allowed to be awkward together. Local authority cuts and ageing buildings have made the old pools expensive to keep. Bon Accord closed in 2008. Elsewhere, campaigners try to save lidos, restore baths, or reheat the dream in new ways. Something Curated's account of the V&A and RIBA exhibition on pools points to Penzance's Jubilee Pool, refurbished by Scott Whitby Studio with geothermal heating; the pool's own site now calls it the UK's largest seawater pool and gives its geothermal water at 28 to 30 degrees.

That revival is heartening, but it also sharpens the loss. The surviving pool becomes special, photogenic, fundable, a heritage object with a good story. The ordinary municipal baths was not meant to be special. It was meant to be there. Every town had its version, or should have done: a building where public health, exercise, boredom, embarrassment, and cheap heat met under a high roof. When the water goes, what remains is not silence. It is the sound of a local authority retreating from the body.

Sources:

A Brief History of Swimming Pools — Worlledge Associates

A Bigger Splash: Britain's Love Affair With the Swimming Pool — The Guardian

Baths and Washhouses Act — UK Parliament

Into the Blue: The Origin and Revival of Pools, Swimming Baths and Lidos — RIBA

Into The Blue: The Origin & Revival Of Britain's Swimming Pools, Public Baths & Lidos — Something Curated

Jubilee Pool — Jubilee Pool

Public Pools as Public Spaces: The Role of Swimming and Bathing in Cities — ArchDaily

Aquatic Sport, Leisure and Recreation in England, c. 1800 — White Rose eTheses