Hackney Council costed Clissold Leisure Centre at two million pounds and a 2000 finish. By the time it opened on the first of February 2002, almost three years late, the figure was thirty-two million. By 2007, after the centre had been forced shut for the better part of four years, the total cost of the building plus its remedial works sat at forty-five million. The original budget was off by a factor of more than twenty. The building had cracks in the squash courts, a roof that leaked across the entire centre, glass walls that retained fetid water around the pools, and a sports-hall floor that warped within twelve months of being walked on.

The official defect schedule, leaked to the Guardian in 2004, ran to fifty-nine numbered items. Defect thirty-two read: roof leaking across whole centre. Defect thirty-three read: roof sweating with condensation. Defect fifty-nine read: water damage to sports-hall floor causing warping and lifting at less than twelve months, with injuries sustained by users. Marcus Fairs, then editor of Icon, called the place "a monument to architectural arrogance and local government ineptitude." A swimming coach told the Evening Standard that rain poured through the roof into the pool from a jug, and that the open-plan changing village made the building a child-protection risk. The Muslim and Hasidic Jewish residents of Stoke Newington, whom the centre was nominally meant to serve, found the changing arrangements unusable on the day it opened.

The architect, Stephen Hodder, was an established and award-winning name. Gleeson, the contractor, was a familiar fixture in the procurement world. Hackney Council, however, had no architect's department of its own. This is the part Jonathan Glancey kept returning to in his Guardian piece a few months after the closure: the borough's local authority architects, the people who would have quietly stress-tested the brief and the drawings before a single tile was ordered, were gone. They had gone the way of council housing in the seventies, down the plughole, said Glancey, and by the time the lottery turned up with prodigious funds for bright new buildings there was no one in the town hall capable of holding a designer to account. The municipal swimming pools that Clissold replaced, late-Victorian baths at Haggerston and Whitechapel, had been thrown up by such departments and ran for a hundred years with few problems.

Hackney sued Hodder. Hodder denied responsibility and blamed the council's inability to host the project. In 2005 a confidential settlement was reached in which Hodder Associates and Gleeson paid Hackney an undisclosed sum without acknowledging fault. The centre reopened, partly, in December 2007.

What sticks about Clissold is that the building was not, by 2002, an outlier. It was the typology. The lottery-funded millennial leisure centre arrived as the proud successor to the seventies leisure-centre boom, and that boom had been a municipal project run by people who knew the limits of their own boroughs. The successor was a contracted-out icon flown in from outside, photographed for a touring exhibition called 12 for 2000: Building the Millennium, endorsed by Chris Smith on the steps of the British Council. Prophetic words, Glancey wrote. The replacement had been costed by people who had never seen the originals work, and the originals had worked because someone in the building knew the borough.

Forty-five million pounds bought Hackney a model of British architecture for an exhibition tour, and a leisure centre that could not keep the rain out of the swimming pool.

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