The lido everyone remembers

A pool for the whole town

The lido opened on Whit Monday 1934, after two years of fundraising by the swimming club and a loan from the borough council. It cost $11,000, and on the first day more than three thousand people paid twopence each to get in.¹ The pool was a hundred feet long, filled with water pumped from the river, and it was, everyone agrees, freezing.

It had a tall white diving board, a café with a curved front in the modern style, and a row of striped changing huts along the north side. On hot Saturdays the line went down Mill Road and round the corner past the bakery.

During the war the pool stayed open, and soldiers from the camp on the hill were marched there on Wednesday afternoons. Several readers remember being told to keep out of the deep end while the soldiers had their turn.

What readers remember

When we asked for memories in the spring, we expected a few letters. We had more than two hundred. Almost all of them mention the cold, the smell of chlorine and fries, and the diving board.

You stood at the top for what felt like an hour, and everyone below was watching. Then you jumped, because climbing back down the ladder was worse.

Others remember the lifeguard, Mr Pruett, who blew his whistle at anyone running and taught three generations to swim with a pole and a canvas belt. He worked at the lido for thirty-one years.²

And many remember the last day, a cold Sunday in September 1989, when the gates closed for the winter and never opened again.

Why it closed

By the 1980s the pool needed new pumps, a new filter and repairs to the cracked tank. The city put the work at $400,000 and, with fewer visitors each year and a new indoor pool planned for the town center, decided it could not pay.³

The site was sold in 1992. The café came down the following year, and houses now stand where the pool was. Only the old ticket kiosk is left, now a bus shelter on Mill Road. Look up at its roof next time you wait for the bus: the small blue tiles are the lido's.