[aspidistra]

With the austerity measures in place in the UK in recent years there have been a few cases of despair at councils closing their swimming pools and leisure centres to try to cut costs. This is often despite fewer and fewer people attending them over the years.

Public swimming pools are a rich seam for nostalgia in Britain. Many public swimming pools were originally built in Victorian times and so fall into the "Always There" backdrop of a city, things you never really enthuse about but would miss if they were gone.

http://www.victoriansociety.org.uk/news/category/swimming-po...

Lidos, public outdoor pools, make up the other half of Swimming Pool Nostalgia. Most were built in the 1930s. They had already fallen out of fashion, really, when I was a kid -- since holidays abroad had become cheap -- but there was one quite near us, about 30 mins drive away, and going there was a bit of a treat.

There have been a few campaigns in recent years -- some successful -- to restore lidos or at least preserve them.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_lidos_in_the_United_...