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In the deep end of the history of pools
Great Lengths: The Historic Indoor Swimming Pools of Britain.
By Dr Ian Gordon and Simon Inglis. English Heritage, £19.99.
THE fierce debate over the future of Kentish Town Baths now may be submerged by other arguments and may be hidden behind the blue boards and scaffolding that clad this edifice while works are carried out, but here remains a fine Grade II-listed building of red brick and decorated terra cotta. A timely reminder of its value has just been published.
Great Lengths, a survey of the “historic indoor swimming pools of Britain” for English Heritage, comes from the Played in Britain team. Kentish Town Baths is featured alongside many others, and expertly placed in a national context.
Comprehensive and supremely well designed, this is a valuable resource for our social and architectural heritage; it is also a very good read. With subtle touches of humour it relates the story of the public baths movement in Britain.
The history of public bathing in Britain is traced here from Roman times to the Middle Ages. The health-giving properties of springs and spas led to the private indulgences of Turkish Baths.
Lord Ashley, later the Earl of Shaftesbury, founded a philanthropic society to establish public baths “to promote cleanliness among the poor.”
In a few years the Baths and Wash Houses Act was passed in Parliament in 1846 in order to encourage local authorities to construct these vital public amenities. The first baths, which had laundry facilities in order to help disinfect clothing, were therefore designated more for the “labouring classes” and were located in poor neighbourhoods. Public baths soon joined other examples of municipal pride, such as art galleries, libraries and concert halls.
Great Lengths not only considers the design of these buildings, fascinating as their Classical, Moorish, Italianate, Queen Anne, Arts and Crafts or other influences may be. It also includes their heating, usually with cheap coal-fired boilers, and their filtration systems.
Such buildings still retain powerful emotional bonds as places where generations of families learned to swim and came also to socialise, and perhaps also to wash or bring their laundry.
A phrase that is repeated in the book – “at the time of going to press” – is one that must be heeded: in Camden, as elsewhere, those who regard public baths and the buildings that house them as vital local amenities, despite what councils may say, must never cease their vigilance.
GERRY HARRISON |
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