When Sean Connery was a lifeguard. A dip into the Kingdom that is no more

On 18 July 1964, anyone buying a copy of The New Yorker could read the story of Neddy, a middle-aged man who had had a few drinks too many at a Sunday party and, since the season was just right for it, decided to swim home, passing through all the swimming pools that lay between him and his villa eight miles away. It is a suburban river stretching the length of 15 residential swimming pools plus one public one. The story is, of course, John Cheever’s ‘The Swimmer’, and, mind you, Tom Fort may not have the rugged physique of Burt Lancaster – who would have played Neddy on the big screen – but this decorated BBC journalist in his seventies has embarked on a journey that is, in every respect, very similar. Only, in the UK’s outdoor public swimming pools. The result is Lido Land: How Britain Learned to Make a Splash (Apollo Publishers, 2026), a book as eccentric as the English tradition would have it, in which, with the same ‘explorer’s’ spirit as Neddy, Tom Fort splashes about through over a century of social housing designed for the leisure time of British citizens.

The ‘lido’, as one might guess, is a loanword from Italian and bears little resemblance to the one in Venice from which it takes its name. Of course, there is no shortage of references to the Italian peninsula in the history of swimming pools across the Channel: Blackpool’s extravagant ‘lido’ was modelled on the Colosseum with an Art Deco twist and hosted the Miss World pageants, whilst at the opening of the Stonehaven lido, references to Roman culture were abundant from the stage reserved for dignitaries. Thermal baths were one of the reasons why the Roman Empire had prospered for so long, and who knows whether they might have had the same effect on the British Empire. Different times, one might say, but the history of the ‘lido’ is inevitably also a story of social and political transformation.

In the 1930s, the Labour Party set out to turn London into a city of ‘lidos’ and opened them in abundance, with the idea that no one should have to travel more than a couple of kilometres to go for a swim. A pioneering version of Gualtieri’s (or rather Carlos Moreno’s) ‘fifteen-minute city’, accompanied by the construction of hospitals, sewers, schools, abattoirs, tunnels and bridges, as well as football pitches, tennis courts and cricket grounds, theatres, cinemas and dance halls. Meanwhile, fashions literally changed: from the woolly, crinkled swimming suits in which bathers could – only at certain times on Sundays – do a few laps alongside gentlemen similarly clad, the trend shifted to bikinis and swimming trunks.

This development did not occur without frowning bishops, accompanied by a retinue of pious women and men, complaining in impassioned letters to local newspapers about the gradual drift away from Victorian propriety, certain dubious associations and aquatic promiscuity. But the damage is now done, and it is no longer just the dandies of the wealthy classes who are splashing about. For instance, in Pontypridd – now the last ‘lido’ still in operation in Wales – the swimming pool was opened in 1927 to allow miners to wash themselves, given that the waters of the surrounding rivers were black with coal residue. Among the regulars was the singer Tom Jones, the son of a local miner. In the 1950s, a strapping Sean Connery—himself the son of a lorry driver and a laundress—took his first steps, or rather his first strokes, as a lifeguard at the gigantic Portobello Pool in Edinburgh.

The trend came to a halt in the mid-1960s with the advent of package holidays: At that point, Her Majesty’s subjects would flood the suddenly affordable hotels and resorts of the coastal towns of Benidorm and Torremolinos, Lloret de Mar and Marbella, to the detriment of once-renowned summer destinations such as Morecambe or Scarborough, but above all their own back garden swimming pools. It is here that Fort’s journey takes on a distinctly nostalgic tone, a plunge into a country that no longer exists, that of the ‘lidos’ that have vanished or are on the verge of vanishing. Two-thirds of Britain’s outdoor swimming pools closed their doors in the second half of the twentieth century. The reasons are clear: they have astronomical running costs, can only be used at a certain time of year (and not even then, given the weather in those parts), and the number of enthusiasts is dwindling.

It is often the very Labour-led local authorities, which had done so much in the past to champion the right to swim, that are now turning off the tap: the ‘lidi’ are seen as bourgeois and superfluous attractions in these lean years. Nevertheless, some of these swimming pools have weathered the municipal budget cuts and property speculation. The one in Brixton, for example, has stayed afloat; this is where Libby Page set her heart-warming novel "The Lido" (La Nave di Teseo, 2018), in which an elderly regular and a feisty local journalist fight to keep the Brockwell Park Lido open, threatened with closure by hard-nosed property developers who could do with a dip themselves. Committees and associations spring up; in short, the ‘lido’ is also a bastion of democracy, with bodies of every shape and colour beneath the surface of the water. Whilst it lasts. All the more reason to plan a trip to Britain’s last remaining ‘lidos’, following the example of Neddy and Tom Fort. And who knows – perhaps they’ll come back into fashion with climate change.