The history of Park Road Lido

Original article published in the Hornsey Historical Society (Bulletin 61)

Open since 1929

Over the last 90 years, generations of people have enjoyed swimming at Park Road Lido. Originally known as Hornsey Open-Air Swimming Bath, it opened in 1929 just ahead of the 1930s Lido heyday.

It it the only outdoor pool left in Haringey as Tottenham Lido was demolished in the 1980s and Durnsford Road Lido filled in. Park Road Lido narrowly escaped demolition when it was closed for three years in 1989 but a successful local campaign ensured its survival.

Since 2014 the lido has been heated to a level that allows all year round swimming for all. A much loved community facility, it is without doubt the jewel in the crown of Haringey's pools.

The outdoor swimming facilities in urban areas in the UK in the early 19th century were predominantly in free municipal swimming lakes and ponds, as well as rivers and canals, and used by men who swam nude. In London there were lakes at Victoria and Brockwell Park both later concrete lined and made into lidos, and ponds that have survived at Hampstead Heath. In seaside towns women and 'respectable' men used bathing machine mobile huts that could be wheeled into the sea to allow bathers to have a private dip.

The Victorians subscribed to the belief that personal cleanliness and physical fitness were closely linked to self-improvement, morality and the work ethic; they encouraged the introduction of bathing facilities for the growing urban population. The Baths and Wash Houses Act of 1846 gave powers to local authorities to provide public baths, with loans made available by the Ministry of Health. The Act specifically included slipper baths for personal washing, wash houses for laundry, and communal swimming baths. The bath and wash houses were mainly designated as first and second class bathers, and segregated by gender. The focus was to provide washing facilities rather than encouraging swimming as a recreational sport.

Early days in Hornsey

Swimming lessons were provided for students at public schools such as Eton and Harrow in the early part of the 19th century, but it was not until the 1890s that the Amateur Swimming Association (ASA) persuaded the Board of Education to include swimming as a part of the Code of Education; although it was still not a mandatory requirement. Instances of mass drownings that could have been avoided, such as that of the SS Princess Alice which sank in 1879 with around 700 drowned, mostly women and children who could not swim, reinforced calls for wider swimming opportunities.

Locally, towards the end of the century, the civic minded and forward thinking Hornsey Urban District Councillor Henry Burt tried to persuade the council to build a swimming pool. Burt was responsible for initiating the building of the Clock Tower at Crouch End and Hornsey's first library among many other successful municipal projects, but he failed to get a swimming pool built.

In 1891 the Stroud Green Swimming Club campaigned for a public swimming bath for the 'men in the small houses' not the ones with 'sumptuously arranged houses'. At the time the nearest indoor communal bathing pool was the Hornsey Road Public Baths and Wash House in Islington, built in 1894.

In continental Europe, particularly Germany, ideas were developed about the benefits of sunshine, sunbathing and the 'cult of outdoor life' and the Mayor of Berlin created people's parks, 'Volksparks' with free swimming pools. In the UK in the early 1900s one factor was the medical discovery of the benefits of sunlight in preventing rickets, a condition known as the 'English disease' because it was so widespread. At the time cod liver oil was the main dietary supplement used to treat rickets but it was noticed that during the summer the need for supplies was very much reduced. It was not immediately recognised that this was connected to the body's ability to produce Vitamin D and promote calcium deposits, but the connection between improved health and exposure to sunlight was made. Influenced by these developments, the London County Council (LCC), formed in 1889 as the principal local government body in inner London, was involved in the design, construction and management of six lido style outdoor pools between 1906 -25. In November 1926, the year of the General Strike, Hornsey Borough Council's Works and Estates Committee noted the need for swimming instruction and swimming displays but no recommendation was made. Two years later in February 1928 the same committee discussed whether it was a wash house rather than a swimming bath that was required, as only 5% of houses in Campsbourne had access to private washing facilities. The Horsey Journal reported that the committee discussed the relative merits of providing wash houses and baths as compared to the provision of swimming pools, and considered that the former was a necessity and the latter a luxury. Finally, when put to vote, the committee agreed the Mayor's recommendation to build a swimming bath next to Crouch End Playing Fields and they made a successful application to the Ministry of Health for funding. On 27 July 1928 the Hornsey Journal recorded that there was 'a strong feeling that a progressive borough like Hornsey should not stand behind on a matter which was so urgently necessary to the health and recreation of the people'.

The need for a wash house was not forgotten and three years after Park Road Lido was built Hornsey High Street Public Baths and Wash House was established and locals can remember using it as recently as the 1960s.

The opening of the lido

The lido was not seen as a positive improvement by all those living in the nearby residential neighbourhoods. In April 1928 a petition against the proposed pool, signed by 40 residents in Wood Vale and Cranley Gardens and led by Mr Feest of Ferme Park Road, was published in the Horsey Journal. The nature of the complaint is unknown but fortunately the council disregarded it and went ahead with the project. By September 1928 there were 16 tenders received and the lowest, £12,670 from Messrs Arundel, Ltd, 10 Newton Rd, Stratford E15 was accepted. It was agreed that there would be no first and second class swimmer fees.

Charges to the general public were agreed as 4y for adults and 2d for under 16s. It was also agreed in May 1929 that the Education Authority would pay 1 penny per child for elementary school pupils to have swimming instruction. The borough produced and distributed 5,000 bills to advertise the opening of the pool in June.

The day the pool opened, Saturday 1 June 1929, the weather was glorious and the water reflected like silver mirror. The official ceremony included the symbolic handing over of a souvenir key to Mayor George Double, followed by swimming and diving displays, school pupil swimming matches, a water polo match, and the British Legion City of London military band provided music.

The lido was competition length, 165' (50.29m), 75' wide (22.86m), at its centre 7' 6" deep (2.28m) and took 400,000 gallons of water. The pool was made of reinforced concrete, with 8' (2.44m) wide paving around it, changing facilities for 175 bathers and a pavilion with a tea room and veranda. It had a strong recreational element with sunken flower beds and lawns and a cycle store.

The Horsey Journal described the 'water cascade' as "magnificent' and not just for 'ornamentation' but used in connection with the filtering and aerating the water. Filtered water was a new breakthrough at that time which avoided the need to clean water by emptying and re-filling the pool. Oddly, no mention of the 10 feet (3m) high diving board and a 1 metre high spring board at the opposite side of the bath to the Pavilion was made in the Ceremonial Opening Programme. It's possible that the diving boards were a later addition.

Unlike many of the later lidos built during the 1930s there was no named architect, rather it was constructed under the 'supervision' of the Borough Engineer, Mr WH Adams. Hornsey Town Council's Alderman Double described it as a swimming bath that was 'necessary and desirable for the improvement of the borough'.

Although initially the pool had segregated sessions and only opened for women and girls from 6.30am - 8.30am, within a matter of days the council agreed that the rest of the day would be for mixed bathing not just men and boys as it had been. However, having two shallow ends allowed the boys and girls to be kept to separate ends of the pool. Three weeks after opening there was a heat wave and the Council agreed to divide the day into sessions to deal with the long queues. The pool was unheated and only open in the summer between April or May and September or October.

By the end of a very successful summer season the council had agreed to £3,000 worth of improvements and that 12 deckchairs for hire should be added before the next summer season. Park Road Lido was built just on the cusp of the 1930s love affair with lidos that were seen as emblems of 'municipal modernity' and magnets for city dwellers; they were packed with swimmers even though the water temperature could be as low as 9 degrees centigrade.

Later developments: memories

After a decade of great popularity, the lido closed during the 1939-46 war years. David Cheeseman, who lived locally at the time remembers that when it re-opened it was possible to hire swimming costumes.

Memories of it being very busy, having a strong smell of chlorine, the sanitising chemical favoured at the time, and an aquamarine coloured water fountain, have remained with him. Also he says that on Sunday mornings the lido shut for an hour to allow quiet during the service at the church next door.

In the 1950s Mike Funnell (who later managed the lido) swam there when he was a schoolboy at Tollington Boys Grammar School (now part of Fortismere School). At that time, he remembers that you could see the machine room pipework through a glass door and that the man in charge of the plant room polished the brass pipes and kept them on proud display. At that time there was room for up to 2,000 swimmers because of the wide paved areas and sunken gardens. Mike's family can trace a long association with the lido as his mother, who went to Campsbourne School, attended the opening ceremony in 1929 when she was eleven years old.

Another regular Park Road lido swimmer in the fifties was Susan Halter, a competitor in the 1948 London 'Austerity' Olympics. Susan, a Hungarian national, survived WWIl after escaping in 1944 from a Nazi forced march whose final destination was Auschwitz. She subsequently moved to London and lived with an aunt and uncle in Crouch End. In 1951 she married the artist Roman Halter and they set up home in Crouch End and regularly swam at the lido. Roman Halter swam long-distance races and played water- polo. Susan Halter competed in Masters Swimming competitions, representing Great Britain up until the age of 85. A bench in their memory is being crowdfunded by the Park Road Lido User Group (PRLUG).

Eleri Rowlands has childhood memories of wanting to swim at the lido in the 1950s but being frustrated by her mother who wouldn't allow her for fear that Eleri might contract polio. It was not until the introduction of the injectable Salk vaccine in 1955 that she finally swam there.

Mike Funnell (Manager 1973-89) also remembers some famous actors who swam at the lido including Eric Porter, who played Soames in the hugely successful 1967 BBC adaptation of John Galsworthy's The Forsythe Saga, Tom Watt, who played Lofty in EastEnders, and Leo McKern who first played Rumpole of the Bailey in a 1975 TV play.

In the mid-60s Hornsey, Wood Green and Tottenham became the newly formed Borough of Haringey, and shortly afterwards it was decided that the diving board and springboard were too dangerous so they were removed. Dot Bruce (Lifeguard then Supervisor at the lido, 1999 - present day) remembers that during the summer holidays of her childhood you could spend all day at the lido and get a bag of chips from the chip shop opposite (now a French restaurant, Les Associés) all for a £1. At that time there was circular slide but that was also removed for health and safety reasons in the early 1970s. She has memories of the storage system run by two male employees who were in charge of baskets that you put your clothes in they gave out a numbered rubber wrist band that a swimmer would later exchange for their clothes.

Roger Garnett (Lifeguard 1982-84 and Manager 2006-2011) says that at one time Haringey had the most pools of any London borough. In the 1970s Durnsford Road Lido (1934-89), Tottenham Lido on Lordship Lane (1937-85), Western Road Baths, (1911-97), Tottenham Public Baths, (1904-91) and Park Road Lido were all in operation. Roger felt that Park Road Lido had a strong community feel when he was there. However, in the summer when swimmers could stay all day lengthy queues grew and tempers flared, so under his management timed sessions were introduced to try and deal with the queues and arguments.

The seventies

In 1971 the Council demolished the Pavilion and the changing rooms around the edge of the paved area and built an indoor leisure centre which opened in August 1973. This reduced the amount of paved and sunken lawns around the lido and the numbers who could be admitted to the lido were reduced to 1,000.

Haringey Council used a mixture of in-house and private architects at that time and, according to lido swimmer and architect, Chris Warham, the new leisure centre was originally designed by A. Maestranzi, who designed the Suffolk Road Estate, but was subsequently contracted out to a private architectural company.

The Horsey Journal reported that the new leisure centre cost £500,000 and had a 'superpool' as well as a luxury sauna with ashtrays on hand. Admission to the centre cost 16p for adults, 8p for children, and the lockers took a 5p coin. Unfortunately, a scandal was uncovered soon after the building work was finished: building materials had been syphoned off and used by a senior member of the management team to build his yacht. Within a short period of time the leaking roof had to be replaced.

At the time that the lido was built it was very much a part of the open 30-acre Crouch End Playing Fields. Two events made significant changes to the appearance of the lido surroundings in the 1970s.

Firstly, according to Mike Funnel, when they dug out the indoor pool the Council saved money by tipping tons of the excavated soil onto the paving around the lido. The soil was seeded, thus giving us the grassed sunbathing areas that we enjoy today. Shane Khedoo remembers that too much soil was deposited at the outdoor café end of the lido and sunbathers could see into the gardens of neighbours on Park Road, so the mound had to be flattened. Also around that time Mike Funnell had the Leylandi hedge planted to deal with the complaints from the adjacent tennis club about lido users staring at the tennis players and putting them off their game!

Right through until the 1980s, Albert Abolian, (Lifeguard 1979-81, Duty Manager 1989-2014), remembers that swimmers and sauna users could hire towels with LB.H. PARK ROAD POOLS embroidered on them - and Albert still has a souvenir from those days. The laundry man would make a weekly visit in his van to collect the towels and take them to Western Road Swimming Pool where there was a washing machine and dryer.

The eighties and after

After Margaret Thatcher came to power in the late 1970s the spending power of Councils was gradually restricted, and this resulted in many public facilities being cut back or closed. In 1989 after a series of poor summers and a decreasing public interest in lido swimming, Haringey Council's Leisure Services closed the Lido in a cost cutting exercise. At around the same time Durnsford Lido was sold and turned into a Garden Centre, Tottenham Lido was demolished and Western Road Baths was filled in and the building became an events venue. Albert Abolian remembers that there plans to fill in Park Road Lido and turn it into a tennis court and cricket practice area - or put a dome over the lido costing around £250,000. All these ideas were abandoned.

There was a long running campaign to get the lido re-opened backed by a local councillor, who, according to Baron Toby Harris of Haringey (then a Haringey Councillor), was the late Councillor Dr Philip Jones. Albert Abolian remembers that Barbara Roche MP and Nigel Benn, a Middleweight Champion Boxer who lived locally, both backed the campaign to have the lido re-opened. Dave Hopkins (Manager 1989-2006) has memories of one particularly colourful campaigner, a man who dressed in a silver space suit and walked up and down in front of the leisure centre with a placard demanding that the lido be re-opened.

The campaign was successful and on Sunday 19 July 1992 after a £15,000 refurbishment there was a grand re-opening. The event was attended by Sarah Hardcastle (1988 Seoul Olympics Silver and Bronze medalist), Barbara Roche MP, Councillor Toby Harris, by then Leader of the Council, and Horsey Journal reporter John Ryan who had his photo taken when he jumped in fully clothed. Ryan reported in the Hornsey Journal, 23 July 1992 that Park Road by then was 'only the second open-air pool in North London'. The event was also recorded by Andy Kershaw for a BBC Radio 4 *Down Your Way, that was due to be aired that October.

The lido remained unheated until around 1992 when Shane Khedo made a welcome mistake, accidentally leaving open a valve from the indoor heated diving pool which meant that warm water leaked into the lido and took the chill off the water, It seems the lido swimmers didn't complain. At some point between then and 1999 the Council Installed a calorifier so that the lido temperature ranged between 11 and 21 degrees centigrade.

The lido now

When a celebration of the lido's 80th anniversary was being organised in 2009, staff asked swimmers to contribute stories about their lido related experiences.

One man recounted that his conception in the early 1950s was as a result of his parents drinking

‘Uncle Stan's home-made elderberry wine. a potent brew, by the lido. Family folklore had it that he was named Paul after the pool and he quipped, 'I often count myself lucky that I wasn’t conceived on their holiday in Devon a couple of months later, I could have ended up being called Cliff!'. At the time of writing the story Paul was 57 but he didn't leave his surname, so sadly it hasn't been possible to verify the story.

Another swimmer, ‘Luminous Jannie’ said that her father was short sighted and insisted that aged 8 she had to wear a luminous swimsuit so that he could see her - clearly a scarring experience for a little girl. Susan Bennett, local resident and lido swimmer since 1966, wrote ‘Who needs Barbados when we have Park Road? We have such a wonderful, unique facility on our doorstep’.

The lido's 80th anniversary celebration was attended by Mayor Alan Dobbie, lido supervisor Dot Bruce, Olympic competitor Susan Halter by then aged 82, Andy Bellasario (local swimmer since the mid- 1980s) and many other locals, and the swimmers’ lido reminiscences were displayed in the hallway.

In the year of the 2012 Olympics Haringey Council moved to outsource many public facilities, Fusion Lifestyle won the competitive bid with a pledge of £l5m investment and took over the management of Park Road Leisure Centre in December of that year.

Fusion removed the last vestige of the original 1929 lido, the fountain, but they built outdoor showers and changing blocks, after closing the lido for a major refurbishment which included installing a booster pump to allow the lido to be heated to a higher temperature. The lido re-opened in October 2014, and from that time it was opened for a few hours each day over the winter

months although sudden closures and erratic hours were common. Unfortunately, in December 2017 a leak was discovered in the lido and it closed again, this time for six months while repairs were carried out.

By the time the lido re-opened in May 2018 the Park Road Lido User Group had been set up. The group's objectives are to get consistent all-year-round opening hours, raise the lido's profile, increase the numbers swimming there, campaign for floodlighting to allow swimming during dark winter mornings and late afternoons, and to work with Fusion to improve the maintenance and management of the lido. There are currently around 250 members.

The lido's 90th birthday was celebrated on 1 June 2019 on a baking hot day with masses of visitors, market stalls, a BBQ, and an exhibition of photographs. Ruth Corney, who has been photographing the lido since Christmas 2018, worked with graphic designer Alice Schaell to produce a display that was unveiled in the leisure centre hallway. There were also poems and drawings by local school children on display by the lido side. Catherine West MP attended, and cut a cake iced with a copy of the original lido logo used on the 1929 programme for the ceremonial opening.

Currently, after long consultation with neighbouring residents, which has included Fusion and Haringey Council agreeing to cut back the leylandi hedge that had grown so high it overshadowed residents' gardens, a planning application for floodlighting has been prepared.

There will also be a funding bid to Sport England towards the cost of installing lighting. Lastly there are plans to provide the lifeguards with covered seats to protect them from the wind and rain on cold winter days.

The lido still has a strong local and community feel and it remains true to its original purpose to promote swimming, fitness, recreation and health for people of all ages in the borough. With PRLUG, the user group, Fusion Lifestyle has put on Moonlight swims, Christmas Day and New Year's Day swims, as well as special fundraising events around campaigns such as World AIDS Day.

We hope that the spirit of the 1930s lido heyday is returning, and that more people will continue to enjoy the benefits of swimming outdoors at Park Road Lido.