A lido is an outdoor public swimming pool. Britain built hundreds of them between the wars, mostly in confident art deco style with terraces, fountains, cafés and sunbathing decks, and they were among the most popular public buildings the country has ever produced.
The name
Borrowed from the Lido di Venezia, the barrier island beach resort outside Venice that was fashionable in the 1920s. British municipal authorities appropriated the name wholesale, on the reasonable calculation that “lido” sold better than “open-air municipal bath”.
Why they were built
The interwar years brought a genuine enthusiasm for fresh air, sunlight and physical health, driven partly by public health concerns after the First World War and the flu pandemic, and partly by a broader modernist belief in sun and exercise.
Local authorities built lidos as civic statements. They were often architecturally ambitious — curved concrete, clean white lines, sunburst railings, fountains — and they were enormous. Some held several thousand bathers, with spectator terraces for galas and beauty contests.
They were also, importantly, free or nearly free, and they gave working-class families access to something that looked like a Mediterranean resort without leaving Sheffield.
The collapse
Almost all of them closed. Cheap foreign holidays, the arrival of heated indoor leisure centres, and — decisively — local authority spending cuts in the 1980s did for the great majority. Around 300 lidos were reduced to roughly 100, and many of the survivors were filled in, built over or left derelict.
The revival
The recovery has been driven almost entirely by local campaign groups rather than by councils, and several restorations are genuinely remarkable:
- Saltdean Lido, near Brighton — a Grade II* listed 1938 modernist building, rescued from demolition by a community campaign and restored.
- Tinside Lido, Plymouth — a semi-circular 1935 pool cut into the rock above the sea.
- Jubilee Pool, Penzance — triangular, seawater-fed, and now partly geothermally heated by a borehole.
- Brockwell, Tooting Bec, Parliament Hill and London Fields in London — Tooting Bec is the largest freshwater pool in England at 90 metres.
- Hathersage in the Peak District, and Ilkley and Ingleton in Yorkshire.
The cold water
Most lidos are unheated, which in Britain means water in the low teens for much of the year and single figures in winter. Several open year-round, and swimming in them in January has gone from eccentricity to genuine trend.
The Serpentine Swimming Club in Hyde Park has swum every morning since 1864 and holds a Christmas Day race for the Peter Pan Cup — J. M. Barrie donated it — in water that is frequently around 4°C.
Cold water swimming’s claimed benefits for mood and inflammation are increasingly studied and not yet settled, but the social side is unambiguous: lidos in winter attract a devoted, chatty and slightly evangelical community, and the café afterwards is at least half the point.