Swimming against the stream

We get a lot of spam emails here at South Leeds Life, offering to help us get to the first page of Google or to redesign our website. I’m sure most of them are fake and I’ve noticed that many have started to use a famous name in the email to get your attention and let your guard down.

So when an email arrived last month purporting to come from Olympic legend Rebecca Adlington I thought to myself “yeah, right!” But as it turned out this one was from Becky, or at least from her company.

The news that she was building a swimming pool for kids right here in Hunslet was so exciting that I had to run a tell my wife.

I have a complicated relationship with swimming so I’ll try to explain. I don’t actually like swimming. I was lucky enough to have a swimming pool at both my primary and secondary schools where I learned to swim, after a fashion.

My big problem with swimming is putting my face in the water. I understand the physics, it makes you more hydrodynamic and helps your buoyancy. It’s the biology I’m unhappy about – I don’t want to drown.

I’ve tried swimming as an exercise when I haven’t been able to run. God it’s boring swimming up and down the same 25m. No, I’m sorry, it’s not for me. So why am I excited about the new pool?

I remember when the council was consulting about building the Aquatics Centre at John Charles Centre for Sport. They were quite explicit that the new 50m pool would not affect either South Leeds Sports Centre (SLSC) or Middleton Leisure Centre’s pools.

The reason was this would be (is) a citywide resource for elite swimmers. It’s big and cool and not great for children’s swimming lessons. It’s also booked out regularly by clubs and galas.

I have an attachment to both SLSC and Middleton Leisure Centre, they are where my kids learned to swim. They have both since closed. I’m not sure if it was the same officer who came to consult us about the closure of SLSC, but I distinctly remember him explaining that there was “too much water in South Leeds.”

That’s quite a statement. Think about it – we have too much poverty, too much homelessness in South Leeds, but we don’t have too much housing, or youth clubs, or … swimming pools actually.

Well, we weren’t having that so I joined the group campaigning to stop the closure. We won a reprieve, but lost the battle to ‘use it or lose it’ in part due to the council’s lack of effort to market the centre to the community.

By then I was running a social enterprise and had already bought one building from the council – Hillside. I looked into buying SLSC, I spoke to other community owned pools and discovered how expensive pools are to keen running. Hillside was struggling financially, so nothing came of it in the end.

By the way, this was one of the very first stories published on South Leeds Life, back in December 2010. We also documented the heartbreaking demolition of the building in October 2013.

What was needed was a big investment in renewable power that would cut the running costs, but we were ten years too early for that opportunity. We now have the PIPES district heating network running across the city and in 2021 the Aquatics Centre got government grants to install heat pumps and solar panels.

I’m not sure how Becky and her company Swim! are balancing the books, but I’m really glad to see them bring the opportunity for local children to learn to swim in an appropriate environment.

Photo: Demolition of South Leeds Sports Centre.  Credit: Jeremy Morton

While you’re here, can we ask a favour?

South Leeds Life is published by a not-for-profit social enterprise. We keep our costs as low as possible but we’ve been hit by increases in the print costs for our monthly newspaper which have doubled in the last two years.

Could you help support local community news by making a one off donation, or even better taking out a supporters subscription?

Donate here, or sign up for a subscription at bit.ly/SLLsubscribe

Thank you for your support