ON THE ROPES AT JESUS GREEN LIDO
6% of the pool-two corners- is assigned to kids - limited hours apply.
A strange hush hangs over Jesus Green Swimming Pool. Silent swimmers plough their way through the water to cover its famous one hundred yards. Day long, from an impressive 7 am start they dominate the pool for twelve hours, going to and fro in three lanes. Fast is full of super swimmers, mostly young athletic and fit, in Lane Two competent swimmers keep up a good pace but it’s often hard to see the difference between them and the crawl athletes in Lane One. Lane Three is the interesting one. Here ‘slow swimmers’ make a relatively leisurely job of the laps ahead, but still tackle the tough challenge of a minimum 200-yard round trip. Not to be sneezed at. Dedicated, determined, these are the denizens of Jesus Green Lido today. It may be a private kind of satisfaction but joyous it is not. The age group ranges from older people to graduate students and young professionals on marathon jags in search of the elusive ‘personal best.’
Today one hundred years after its opening, Jesus Green Lido is home – principally - to a fitness cult. Lane swimmers understandably love their sport, along with the traditional older slow swimmers they marvel at the facility -it is now more or less exclusively theirs.
But there are misgivings around .
“It is very Puritan” one observer commented last Sunday as we sat in quiet under the hot late August sun, and added,’ Where is the fun?”
Where indeed? Where are the whoops of joy – and the screams of excitement, the splashes and the stunts of a normal swimming pool? Back in 1923 this large pool was opened for the use of the people of Cambridge. One way and another, the use has dwindled to a well-catered- for civic minority How has it come about? And where are all the youngsters?
The booking system begins the subtle business of sifting the customers. Then on arrival they get a niggardly 6% of the pool to swim in. No wonder the crowds of youngsters who once practised their widths now don’t like Jesus Green.
The spirit of post Covid authoritarianism hangs heavy over the entrance procedure. Why book at all? Why not just rock up on a whim?
Another drastic rule aimed at exclusion is the newly installed tinny Tannoy system. At 5pm it declares Swim for All is finished. Any non-lane swimmer has to vacate the pool. It did even announce ‘ Under sixteens must leave the pool’ re-phrased recently. But the upshot of it is families have to pack up and cede their small corner.. The lane swimming resumes. In summer, in the holidays, in the warm evenings, the fun, such as it is, is over at five o clock, prime time for kids and mothers after school or clubs, whilst the lane swimmers resume their monopoly and plough on for another blissful two hours.
The ropes have taken over. They seldom come down.
On Monday the Deputy Mayor honoured the founders of Jesus Green Lido. What would they think if they saw the pool for Cambridge, they managed to get built against the odds, is now no longer a universal resource?.
We call for a fair share of the pool. An open lido with no ropes, for busy sunny days (lane-swimmers in the early mornings). We want a fair price for children’s entry and no Five-o-clock curfew – the prime time for over-heated after-school children, flirty teenagers, sticky toddlers and exhausted mothers. Once this was a humming centre of young activity, often raucous, even hazardous - but it was fun. The silent replacement is neither.Jesus Green Lido needs its Fairweather Friends as well as its regular swimmers.
Let the Children Swim and let’s share a flexible pool with people who love water, its excitement and its allure, water to caper about in, to dive and show off in, water to even swim in when you choose without any ropes to guide you down a lane. That was the promise of 1923 – why not restore it for the next century? After all there’s plenty of room down there for everyone.
Is there enough room for everyone?
