Ahead of our Lost Gardens of London exhibition opening on 23 October, we’re asking people to share their favourite city gardens lost to time. Director Christopher Woodward picks the Peerless Pool:
In 1743 a jeweller William Kemp opened Peerless Pool, just west of where Old Street Roundabout is today. It was London’s first outdoor swimming pool and the centrepiece of a pleasure garden, one theme in Todd Longstaffe-Gowan’s exhibition: that is, a garden for which you bought a ticket, and attractions inside might include a library, tea-room or tavern, and bowling green. Peerless Pool was unique of London’s pleasure gardens in that it also had a fish-pond (below) and at right angles a swimming pool, each fed by an ancient stream whose deeper, muddier waters had drowned boys in the 16th century and given the name ‘Perilous’.
Kemp made a rectangle with a stone edge, marble steps, and gravel bottom. It was the length of an Olympic Pool, but between 3 foot 6 inches and 4 foot 8 inches deep. This is significant: it was designed on the basis that few people could swim and the majority of visitors splashed around. (The 18th-century Cold Baths at Rousham or Stourhead are favourites of aquatic garden historians but each is shallow enough that you do not need to know how to swim). In 1811 William Hone wrote of Peerless Pool:
“Trees enough remain to shade the visitor from the heat of the sun on the brink. On a summer evening it is amusing to survey the conduct of the bathers; some boldly dive, others timorous stand and then descend step by step, unwilling and slow; choice swimmers attract attention by divings and somersets, and the whole sheet of water sometimes rings with merriment. Every fine Thursday and Saturday afternoon in the summer columns of Bluecoat boys, more than a score in each, headed by their respective beadles, arrive and some half strip themselves ‘ere they reach their destination. The rapid plunges they make into the Pool and their hilarity in the bath testify their enjoyment of the tepid fluid.”
It was not until the 1890s that scientists discovered that germs could be transmissible in water; until then it was believed that bathing together in shared water was good for health. By that date Peerless Pool has been built over for housing.
A short cycle ride away is Oasis Sports Centre. There has been a swimming pool on this site since the 1930s and since 1995 I have swum here and sun-bathed on the upper platform built in the 1960s to have the glamour of a ‘ship’s deck’, so Camden Council declared. There is nowhere quite like it in London on a hot afternoon; dancers lazing before performing at a musical lazing beside bearded nurses off an NHS shift, and always a tawny pride of older women from the Council housing built by Powell & Moya in the 1980s. Once, on a day when all of London went indoors for a football final, it was just a girl sun-bathing with her name spelled out by a necklace. We cycled away to drink champagne on a rooftop over a silent Trafalgar Square as if the only two people in an abandoned metropolis.
Oasis is a 27.5 metre pool raucous in summer and steaming in the winter which has saved me from indecision a hundred times. In the pandemic, a community garden began.
However, Historic England has recently granted the site a Certificate of Immunity from listing: that is, a developer pays a fee of some thousands of pounds to ask to know if for five years it cannot be listed. The Historic England report declares that the Sports Centre and the adjacent office block does ‘not display the high level of quality or innovation required for either office buildings or swimming pools from the post-war period to be worthy of listed status’. But the same could have been said of Peerless Pool, which is now only remembered in a street-name, or a pub. Oasis is the last open air public pool in central London.
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