Lido guide: spring arrival

As spring heralds the opening of seasonal lidos, author of The Lido Guide, Emma Pusill, examines the challenges facing small, volunteer-run pools and the current campaigns to restore old pools and even build new lidos. 

The southern hemisphere summer sustains me through the winter months. I turn to the posts of our wider swimming community, whose summer comes during our darkest, greyest months, for my vicarious shot of blue. I might not be able to feel their warmth on my back, but I can see it in their faces. 

Social media can be, for some, a place of turmoil and conflict but a carefully curated, swimming-focussed news feed works nothing but magic when a little bit of southern hemisphere summer washes up on the drab shores of a British winter.

But the tables are turning. Spring is very definitely in the air across much of the northern hemisphere and soon it will be our turn to spend long, lazy days in and out of the ocean, stretching out some distance in lakes or drifting down rivers.

And let’s not forget our lidos. At the time of writing it remains to be seen just how many may be forced to keep the turnstiles silent this year due to high energy costs. We can but hope that by the time you read this some support will have been announced to plug the gap left by the baffling government decision, reached in late 2022, not to add swimming pools to the list of energy intensive industries eligible for government support with escalating fuel bills. Without that support some of our best loved lidos could be in real trouble – particularly the small, volunteer-run pools that are the lifeblood of the communities they serve.

It’s disappointing that the government, in failing to offer timely support to pools such as these, is turning its back on a new-found confidence in the lido sector that hasn’t been seen since the 1920s/30s. It is no exaggeration to say that 2023 is shaping up to be the year of the lido. 

Eilish McGuiness, Chief Executive of The National Lottery Heritage Fund confirms that it has, to date, made grants of in the region of £13m to restore and celebrate lidos in the UK. In January 2023 it built on that foundation by making a grant of almost £100,000 to Future Lidos, a working collective of groups and individuals who are involved with campaigns and projects to restore or build lidos – there are around 40 such known projects. The grant will fund the aptly named ‘Pooling Resources’ – a project to develop a digital toolkit to help move these campaigns to fruition.

And the evidence suggests that Future Lidos is not striving in vain. 2023 will see three new lidos come on stream – Cleveland Pools in Bath, Albert Road in Hull and Sea Lanes on the Brighton shore. Individually, and collectively, they represent a significant amount of funding committed by individuals, grant givers, local authorities and the private sector. And that funding represents an enormous amount of confidence in the power of lidos to support and transform communities. Be sure to put these pools on your 2023 must-swim lists because they are the vanguard of the lido revolution.

As the northern hemisphere seasons turn, the lido sector quite literally has a spring in its step that hasn’t been seen for almost a hundred years. The future is bright. The future is lido.

Photo Suzy Slemen Photography. This article is from the March 2023 issue of Outdoor Swimmer. Click here to subscribe to the magazine. The Lido Guide buy Emma Pusill is available to buy now. ‘Cleveland Pools welcomes swimmers for the first time in 40 years’; read our article from the opening day.