One summer day in 2003, the local residents of Hackney, north-east London, were invited on a tour of the abandoned site of London Fields Lido. Although closed since 1988, the pool was not empty. Squatters had moved in, and held raves in the old pool tank – much to the annoyance of campaigners, who had cleaned it up for community events. The tour was to introduce locals to a bold new redevelopment plan for the lido: to reopen the pool, install a cafe and evict the squatters.

As the locals were shown around, the squatters sat in front of the changing rooms, where purple buddleia had begun to grow above the doors, and watched them. One woman on the tour, meanwhile, enquired whether she would have to swim if she wanted a coffee. It was a moment that seemed to capture the extremes of life in Hackney: young homeless people facing eviction, and an affluent new resident who saw an opportunity for a latte.

Bathing reduces rich and poor, high and low, to a common standard of enjoyment and health Sir Josiah Stamp, 1936

London Fields Lido is a great success story for Hackney. It is a triumph for local campaigners and a magnet for visitors since its reopening in 2006. More than a quarter of a million swimmers now visit annually, a figure that is “unheard of” for an open-air pool, according to Better, the charitable social enterprise that manages it. Over the decade, visits are up 140%.

Campaigners, however, remember the 18 years spent trying to resurrect it. When the pool closed for refurbishment last year, it stayed closed for four months longer than expected, causing locals to anxiously recall the fate of Haggerston Baths a mile away. The grade-II listed building closed in 2000. Despite a 16-year battle, it did not reopen: an unhappy ending for local campaigners.

Indeed, you could write an alternative history of Hackney through the story of its pools. As well as London Fields and Haggerston Baths there was the catastrophe of Clissold Leisure Centre, which cost £45m –nearly seven times the original budget – and closed in 2003 for four years following a flood, just 18 months after it had opened. There is also the furore over Britannia Leisure Centre, which despite a £300,000 facelift in 2016 is to be demolished as part of a major redevelopment that will include a leisure centre with three swimming pools, a school and 480 new homes – only 80 of which will be classed as affordable. Victoria Park was once home to the largest modern lido in London. It was demolished in 1990 to make way for a car park.



Clissold Leisure Centre in Hackney, which cost £45m and, as the result of a flood, closed for four years just 18 months after opening. Photograph: David Levene/The Guardian

The closure of pools has been disastrous for Hackney schoolchildren. In 2006, a feasibility study on Haggerston Baths found that four out of the five secondary schools surveyed did not provide any form of swimming, due to lack of funding or facilities. At one point in the mid-noughties there was only one swimming pool with lanes to serve a population of more than 200,000.

Hackney has long been one of the most deprived boroughs in the country. While its ranking has improved since 2010 – from second most deprived borough to 11th – there are stark pockets of inequality. Some of the poorest people in Britain live alongside some of the most affluent, particularly in Stoke Newington, Hoxton and Shoreditch. Thirty-one per cent of children in the borough live in poverty.

In the last decade and a half, the gap has grown more visible, as Hackney has become one of the hippest destinations in London, with its chic restaurants, boutiques and cafes. On a hot summer weekend, there are so many people in the park that it looks as if there’s a festival underway. And at the heart of it all is London Fields Lido.

London Fields, which on a hot summer weekend can look as though a festival is underway. Photograph: samc/Alamy Stock Photo

Caroline, who serves freshly baked croissants and toasties at a kiosk in the lido, has lived in the neighbourhood for 33 years and has seen the new arrivals flood in. Her flat overlooks the park and she complains about the impact of the crowds – the shortage of toilets and the noise. She regrets the loss of community spirit, and feels that, with rare exceptions, the incomers don’t know how to be good neighbours. ‘I think they’re afraid, they don’t want to mix,” she says. “People walk past you as though you’ve got green wires coming out of your head.”

Continental glamour for gloomy British summers

The original Lido is an island beach resort in Venice. It became the popular name for open air pools in the 1930s, bringing continental holiday glamour to gloomy British summers during a boom for building outdoor pools. It was with this ambition that London Fields Lido opened in 1932.

As Janet Smith reveals in her very enjoyable history Liquid Assets, the fashion for lido-building was driven by an egalitarian ethos. When Morecambe’s open air pool opened in 1936, Sir Josiah Stamp, a director of the Bank of England, declared: “Bathing reduces rich and poor, high and low, to a common standard of enjoyment and health. When we get down to swimming, we get down to democracy.” London County Council (LCC) was particularly zealous in its lido-building programme. Herbert Morrison, leader of the LCC in the late 30s, wanted London to be a “city of lidos”, with every citizen within walking distance of an open air pool.

Where have we gone so badly wrong that Liverpool, Sheffield, Leeds, Newcastle, Hull, don’t offer this standard of living to everybody? Jon Burke, Hackney councillor

Margaret Thatcher signalled the end for public swimming with her war on local government spending. London Fields Lido was just one of the many casualties in the 1980s as councils cut their budgets.

Mike Martin remembers standing in front of the bulldozer at 7am. He was part of a campaign to save London Fields Lido, which had halted the council’s plans to demolish the pool – but he and his fellow campaigners were then tipped off that the demolition team had somehow not got the message and had turned up to do the job anyway. The lido was saved in the nick of time.

In their determination to resurrect London Fields Lido, campaigners including Martin joined forces with architects and the Environment Trust, and presented plans for the pool to the community in 2003. Hackney council finally agreed to fund the renovation in 2004.

‘A promenade for the East End fashion set’ ... Broadway Market. Photograph: Chris Lawrence/Alamy

The transformation that has taken place in the neighbourhood since was initially driven by campaigners seeking to regenerate the borough – not only at the lido, but also a few minutes away on Broadway Market, a street below London Fields that was once a drovers’ route into the city. It hosts a hugely successful Saturday market launched by local residents and traders in 2004, two years before the pool reopened. Time Out calls the street “a promenade for the East End fashion set”.

Many people are boosters of the newly revitalised area. “What does it say about the last 30-odd years of government in this country that people from other parts of the country are travelling down to London to spend the weekend in a park?” asks Hackney councillor Jon Burke, who is responsible for energy, sustainability and community services, including lidos. “Where have we gone so badly wrong that Liverpool, Sheffield, Leeds, Newcastle, Hull, don’t offer this standard of living to everybody?”

The lido does not reflect the demography of Hackney. It’s very white, it’s very middle class, it’s quite young. Josephine Bacon, lido users' group

For some of the campaigners who kickstarted the regeneration, however, there is a rueful recognition of the role they may have played in changing the character of the neighbourhood. Liz Veitch, a retired teacher, says that when she first moved to London Fields 25 years ago, she could almost see the tumbleweed blowing down Broadway Market, a street that had once been home to a popular East End market. Hackney council made a number of failed attempts to revive it, but it was only when local residents took on the challenge that the market succeeded. Her late husband, journalist Andrew Veitch, played an instrumental role in the market’s success, setting up a community interest company that he ran for 10 years. The revival of the market was a catalyst that helped transform London Fields into a destination for hipsters, swiftly followed by the reopening of the lido.

Cafe Francesca, Broadway Market, which a fierce local campaign attempted to save from developers. Photograph: David Levene/The Guardian

“In the beginning it was local people trying to make what was a beaten up area a bit more attractive,” says Veitch. “People who moved in here, like us, felt they ought to do more in the community. I would say that the people buying into this area do not seem to share the same sense of community. The youngsters buying or renting these flats are too busy trying to live, but also there is an air of entitlement amongst amongst some of the more affluent members of the next generation. Thatcher’s children if you like. They don’t get involved here. When we were growing up, it was a mantra that was part of our upbringing - if you’re in a community you join in and do what you can.”

When Hackney Council began selling off properties in Broadway Market at the start of the millennium, resulting in the eviction of popular local independent businesses, there was a huge campaign to stop the demolition of Cafe Francesca, run by Tony Platia for 30 years. Gentrification became a very dirty word, as Hackney council was accused of betraying the neighbourhood and getting into bed with the property developers.

Critics say that the new Broadway Market is not serving the community – a complaint that is also made of the lido. It’s not easy to make an accurate assessment. A survey by the market in 2015 revealed that 81% of its visitors were from east London; they were predominantly white and under 40. The survey assessed a small sample and did not include the socioeconomic background of the customers. Better, which runs the lido, only has data on its members (there are 2,000), so one has to rely on observation and anecdote.

“The lido does not reflect the demography of Hackney,” says Josephine Bacon, who runs the lido user group. “It’s very white, it’s very middle class, it’s quite young. Hackney and Better’s advertisements promote swimming for everyone, saying come and join in, and they have photographs of black people on their posters and banners. Of course there are some black people there, but hardly any. And probably not very many unemployed or low income swimmers either. And I’m not really sure why - whether because it’s too expensive or because London Fields has become a chi-chi area. I don’t know what can be done to make it more inclusive.”

The London Aquatics Centre, designed by Zaha Hadid and built for the 2012 Olympic Games. Photograph: John Stillwell/PA

It’s a problem that goes beyond Hackney. Swim England’s research in 2015 revealed that ethnic minorities are half as likely to know how to swim as white members of the population. The closure of Hackney’s pools in the noughties may also have had an impact on the next generation of swimmers. It may, however, be true that the number of options is increasing: London Fields Lido is dwarfed by the London Aquatics Centre in Stratford, a legacy of the 2012 Olympics that is home to three pools. The once run-down neighbourhood of Hackney Wick, on the edge of what was the Olympic Park, is now touted as the next London Fields – but that has also meant the demolition of Vittoria Wharf, which had been a community of poorer residents and artists.

London Fields Lido “is not a country club for the affluent,” Burke insists. “It’s important that this facility is able to be accessed by people irrespective of their socioeconomic, ethnic, religious backgrounds.” He says he hopes that the new refurbishment of the changing rooms – which includes the introduction of internal cubicles and internal lockers – will broaden its appeal, as well as satisfying those who have previously been concerned about modesty or security.

So far, it’s hard to tell. The newly-refurbished lido reopened in January; many of the swimmers are young and white, more typical of newcomers to the neighbourhood than longtime residents. This may not be the classless vision of lido culture that its great political advocates imagined in the 30s when they built the pools in London and across the UK. It may not be the community that the campaigners imagined either, when they fought to revive the lido and what was then a run-down market street. But it’s now a fixture and a landmark – even if that’s as a symbol of division as much as transformation.

This article was amended on 19 April 2018 because an earlier version said that the demolition of Vittoria Wharf forced out a community of poorer residents and artists. This has been corrected.

A version of this article appears in Tales of Two Londons, edited by Claire Armitstead

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