The Swimming Pool at the End of the Season

Marchford Lido opened in 1936, holds four hundred thousand litres, and is unheated.

It closes on the last Sunday in September and reopens in May, and in between it is drained, and the eight months of it being an empty concrete rectangle is, in the view of the people who use it, the price of the four months of it being the best thing in the town.

This year it is not reopening.

The decision

The structure is failing. This is not disputed by anybody, including the campaign.

The 1936 tank is unlined concrete and it leaks. It has always leaked. In 2019 it leaked eleven thousand litres a day and in 2024 it leaked forty-one thousand, and the water bill is now larger than the staffing bill.

The engineering report gives three options: patch it annually until it fails catastrophically, reline it for one point four million, or close it.

The council has chosen the third.

The campaign

Eleven hundred members. Very well run, by a woman called Sunita who does something with logistics and who has been formidable.

They have raised four hundred thousand pounds in nine months, which is genuinely remarkable and which is not one point four million.

The council's position is that it cannot commit the balance. The campaign's position is that the council found two million for a car park in 2022.

Both of these are true and they are not about the same budget, and nine months of public argument have not moved anybody an inch.

The swimmers

There are about four hundred regulars and eleven of them swim in the coldest water in the season, in May and late September, and they are a subculture within a subculture and are regarded by everybody else as slightly unwell.

The oldest is Vera Nkemelu, seventy-nine, who has swum here since 1961.

The youngest of the eleven is Danny, fifteen, whose mother is one of the other eleven and who has been coming since he could walk.

The last week

The lido stayed open the full season. The council did not close it early, which it could have, and which Sunita has publicly acknowledged and thanked them for, which cost her something with the more furious end of her own campaign.

Attendance in the last week was the highest in the pool's recorded history: four thousand one hundred people across seven days, in September, in water at fourteen degrees.

The queue on the Saturday went round the block and along the recreation ground and people waited two hours.

The last Sunday

Nine hundred people in the building. Capacity is four hundred and eleven and the manager, a man called Ross who has run it for six years and who was made redundant in August, made a decision at about eleven o'clock that he has declined to explain to anybody.

He let them all in, in shifts, all day, and ran twenty minutes late on every one, and nobody complained.

What happened at four

The eleven cold-water swimmers had asked for the last twenty minutes.

Not exclusively — they had asked for the last twenty minutes to be theirs and for everyone else to stay, and that is a different request and is the reason it worked.

At twenty to five, nine hundred people got out of and stood around a four-hundred-thousand-litre concrete rectangle in Marchford, and eleven people got in.

They swam the length. Fifty metres. Vera Nkemelu did it in the outside lane where she has swum since 1961 and took about four minutes and nobody helped her out at the far end because she has never permitted it.

Then they got out, and Ross blew the whistle he has blown for six years, and that was the season.

What happened at five

Nothing organised.

Nine hundred people did not leave. There was no plan for this and no speech and Sunita, who had prepared one, did not give it, and has said since that not giving it was the best decision she made in nine months.

People stood around the edge for about forty minutes and then went home in ones and twos.

The drain

The pool is drained the week after closing. It takes about nine hours.

Ross did it on the Wednesday, alone, as he has done six times.

Sunita asked whether the campaign could come and watch.

Ross said no, and then rang her back an hour later and said yes, and about sixty people came and stood on the terrace in the rain while four hundred thousand litres went out of a hole in the bottom of a concrete tank built in 1936.

It takes nine hours. Most of them left after two.

Vera Nkemelu stayed for the whole nine and Ross put a chair out for her and then a second chair and sat in it.

Now

The campaign has not stopped. Sunita has been clear that the four hundred thousand is held in trust and is not going anywhere and that the tank is not being filled in, which is the thing that actually matters — a drained lido can be reopened in eleven years and a filled-in one cannot.

She has got that in writing. It took her four months. It is the single most important thing anybody achieved this year and almost nobody in the town knows about it.

The gates are locked. There is a sign.

Vera Nkemelu walks past it most days. In February, in a hard frost, somebody saw her standing at the railings for about ten minutes, looking at an empty concrete rectangle with ice in the bottom of it, and then walking on.