It shames me to admit this, but I haven’t been near a public swimming pool for many a year. Hotel pools, yes; the sea – occasionally, in parts of the world with predictable warmth. But I have resisted the new wave of ‘wild’ swimming and was never a regular – to be honest even an irregular – at the Hampstead Ladies’ Pond. Nor have I frequented health clubs or spas, though I did go to enquire about one that had opened nearby; then came the pandemic.
As a one-time regular pool user, I am taking another look. This is because I have just completed my four-session NHS allocation of hydrotherapy (for a broken ankle). And they bade me farewell with a wodge of papers, which include a long list of public pools all over London where I might possibly continue my hydro-regime.
Public pools and leisure centres have adopted the practices of private gyms and spas, designed primarily for urban professionals
This manner of farewell, incidentally, has a name: it is something the NHS, local authorities and charities call ‘sign-posting’, and it’s an ingenious way of passing the buck. What it actually does is allow paid staff or well-intentioned volunteers to tick a box that says ‘job done’, when all they have actually done is pass on a load of information to the patient or petitioner, often couched in baffling officialese, which is then left to us to decipher and, maybe, act on.
But that’s by the by. My information sheets contained one surprise. You would have thought that, after all the complaints about how every pool in the land was at risk as a result of austerity or the pandemic, they would all have run dry. Well, London may be unusually fortunate, but my leaflet lists more than a dozen pools, where – to quote – ‘you can continue your hydrotherapy’.
The availability of pools, however, turns out to conceal a more complicated reality, whether you want to improve your ankle mobility or just have a swim. In those long-ago days when I would frequent local pools, all you had to do was turn up with your towel and your ‘bathers’ (now, regrettably, I learn, termed a ‘cozzie’), paid your 50p or whatever, found a cubicle, took a shower and plunged, or shivered, your way in.
How things have changed. Pools are now ‘leisure facilities’, some are run for councils by private companies, others by the council directly. But all the ones that I looked at have nigh-impenetrable websites, advertising the multiplicity of what is on offer – without much of the practical information you might need: like when can I swim, and what does it cost. Hunting down anything akin to hydrotherapy requires a facility for gymnastics, at least of the mind.
To ‘access’ any of this information, you must ‘register’, divulge volumes of personal data, and take out a ‘membership’, for which there is invariably a dizzying array of ‘special offers’. Just turning up and paying a flat fee for a ticket, it seems, is no longer what you do. Some pools publish their timetables, and all have a myriad of special sessions – for women, seniors, mothers and babies and the like, with ‘fitness’ sessions, which turn out to be nothing more interesting than lap swimming.
Something called ‘aqua-aerobics’ looked as though it might approximate ‘hydrotherapy’, or as much as I needed it to, but I spent hours trying to figure out which pools actually offered this (not many, or not many that say so), what it cost, when it happened and how to book it. On the rare occasion I chanced upon a timetable that included such a session at a pool less than an hour away by public transport (I’m still hobbling, by the way), it was not happening, full, or bookable only nearer the date.
Exhausted by the effort – even before getting to a pool – I resorted to emailing the basic questions that the websites did not answer. So here is a special thank you to Adam from an organisation called Better – which calls itself a ‘charitable social enterprise’ and seems to run quite a few leisure centres – who replied with a location and times, but when I asked how to book, sent me back into the infernal loop where the only ‘fitness activity’ on offer is lap swimming.
The internet and the proliferation of apps have ensured that there is a blizzard of information and promotions out there, but rather less information that is either useful or usable. In fact, you are probably better doing what I will do one day, which is actually to go to the pool and find out from there.
What I was hoping to find, and was assured exists, was a group workout in warm-ish water in a public pool. But if it does exist, whoever provides it is doing a pretty good job of hiding it. And what seems to have happened over the years is that public pools and leisure centres have adopted the practices of private gyms and spas, designed primarily for urban professionals. This means complex membership schemes, incentives for this and that, and ‘tailored’ packages that might suit those who have regular schedules and a good income, but effectively exclude those who don’t.
The consequence is that fitness, like so much else, is fast on the way to becoming a preserve of the better off, in terms not just of money (those who can afford to join a private club), but also of time (those who can fit their schedule around what the public provider chooses to offer).
Which may help to explain two mysteries. One is why National Fitness Day, which fell last month – sorry, I didn’t notice it, either – has increasingly become a pretext for lamenting what the government has described as the country’s ‘stubbornly high levels of inactivity’. The UK now ranks 12th out of 15 comparable European countries for levels of physical activity.
The other mystery might be why so many Britons have been rushing to have themselves jabbed with Wegovy and other substances promising weight loss. Anyone who has engaged in a fruitless search for public exercise provision – not necessarily because it does not exist, but because it is so hard to find – might well conclude that injections offer a quicker, easier route to a slimmer and fitter life than, say, navigating the complexities of swimming at your local pool.
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