As well as helping to prevent drowning accidents, learning to swim helps to develop the heart and lungs, improves posture and also is a good low-impact exercise for people with injuries. It also enables you to enjoy fun activities like canoeing, yachting, paddle-boarding, triathlons and surfing.
It’s a shame that old-fashioned pay-as-you-go swimming pools have disappeared, as today you have to mostly sign up for monthly memberships, which many people can’t afford to do. Enter your postcode to find local pools which are more affordable than swanky gyms, or approach out-of-season hotels as many offer memberships in quiet seasons, though obviously the caveat is that there are likely no lifeguards. But its nice to find a quiet pool to support local hotels, and you may benefit from uncrowded pools.
Does learning to swim prevent drowning? Yes. Drowning is the third cause of accidental death for children, yet lessons are only compulsory for some schools. Yet knowing how to swim could one day save their lives.
the greenest choices for swimming costumes
Swimwear is not eco-friendly (one company makes organic swimwear but at $300 a pop, most people won’t be buying). And wearing cotton t-shirts is not recommended, as they could swell up in water and cause drowning). Conventional swimwear used to be made from nylon, now the rage is ‘recycled nylon made from fishing waste’. Sounds good, but of course it still could leach microplastics out to sea, or if you launder costumes in the machine.
Sustainability experts say the best advice is simply use the most sustainable swimwear you can find (unless you’re planning to swim in the buff at a nudist beach!). Just rinse and flat-dry costumes, only laundering if needed. Environmental professor Timo Rissanen says that recycled polyester from bottles into fabrics, just sheds more microfibres into the ocean, and is best to simply recycle bottles into more bottles. You can use microplastic catchers (but most people don’t own them). And even then, collected fibres at landfill end up in drains anyway, if there’s heavy rainfall.
a history of outdoor swimming lidos
Lidos are outdoor public bathing pools, as an alternative to chlorine-soaked pools. A few are derelict but many communities are doing them up, to be used by the public once again. They first became popular in the early 1800s (the first opened in the city of Bath, in a Grade II listed building).
Named after the Italian word for ‘coast’, the aim was to keep people well and create jobs. Many tourists flocked to Blackpool and Scarborough simply due to lidos. Some are now important Art Deco buildings like Plymouth, Penzance and Saltdean (near Brighton). London once had almost 70 lidos.
In the 1960s, a report said swimming pools should be indoors, so many lidos were destroyed due to lack of funding. Now many charitable trusts have changed their mind and others are being restored by community groups.
how to build a natural swimming pool
Free from chlorine, natural swimming pools are sometimes built by people with big gardens and funds to do so. These use plants to naturally clean the algae and support local pollinators (know toxic plants to avoid near pets and remember that blue-green algae is very poisonous so be aware of this).
Keep all swimming pools covered when not in use, to prevent drowning accidents. Dogs can usually swim but can still cramp (talk to your vet regarding suitable lifejackets, some are not comfortable).
To keep wildlife safe near pools, use FrogLog (a ladder to let small critters escape) and Critter Skimmer (rescues trapped creatures – get both as they do different things). How many you need, depends on pool size (see each site for info). Dogs can usually swim but can still cramp (talk to your vet regarding suitable lifejackets, some are not comfortable).
The Island Swimmer is a the big-hearted debut novel from Lorraine Kelly, who proves she can write as well as she giggles! The story of a woman who returns home to Orkney’s wild landscape, when her father falls ill. She meets her estranged sister (the relationship broken after a childhood trauma).
Yet as Evie clears out her father’s house, she finds herself drawn to a group of cold-water swimmers, who find calmness beneath the waves. And together they help her face up to mistakes of the past, unlocking a treasure of truths that will reverberate through the community, and shake her family to its core.
