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The oldest outdoor swimming pool in the UK – the Grade II listed Cleveland Pools in Bath which first opened in 1815 – will reopen during the summer of 2023, after significant restoration. With a new 50-metre outdoor pool having opened in Brighton) in June and a council-funded restoration under way in Hull, the simple pleasure of the public outdoor pool is seeing a return to popularity to the UK.
In the early 20th century, an explosion of new outdoor pools opened across Britain. Taking the name “lido” from the Italian word for coastline, the boom of construction in the 20th century was part of the post-war public works programme, which aimed to create jobs and promote health. While indoor pools had been gender segregated, public lidos were deliberately mixed and became synonymous with fun and socialising.
Lidos at coastal towns such as Scarborough and Blackpool were destinations for residents and tourists. Lido design between the 1920s and 1940s was innovative and drawn from exotic sources, such as European resorts and cruise ships. They incorporated sumptuous sundecks, sophisticated outdoor restaurants and cafes, alongside vast inviting bathing areas. Impressive diving boards challenged those brave enough to leap theatrically and please the crowds. These lidos were able to accommodate thousands of visitors as wholesome, accessible leisure destinations.
Some of the most iconic lidos are the magnificent art deco sites in Saltdean, Plymouth and Penzance in the south of England. These stunning sites have thankfully been saved from demolition, many others were not. Lido lovers remain hopeful that another art deco site, Broomhill in Ipswich, will one day be restored.
Lidos were grand constructions and monuments of civic pride, both for those who created them and for those who frequented them. They reflected times of change in society and great optimism. At their peak, there were more than 300 active public outdoor pools in the UK, with 11 in Liverpool and 68 in London.
The 1960 Wolfenden report, Sport and the Community and the 1968 Sports Council report Planning for Sport were catalysts for the demise of outdoor swimming pools in policy. The mandate was that “as a general rule, [pools] should be indoors”.
Lidos fell into disrepair and were steadily replaced or destroyed, after councils no longer saw them as part of their leisure facilities and reduced or stopped funding. At the turn of the century, only around 130 public outdoor pools remained, predominately in the south of the UK. That number hardly changed in the following two decades.
The steady loss of these lidos didn’t go unnoticed. The Thirties Society’s report Farewell my Lido (1991) and then Janet Smith’s important 2005 English Heritage-funded book Liquid Assets (with a forthright foreword from artist Tracey Emin) document the history and argued passionately for a brighter future for these much-loved public luxuries.
But as local councils faced financial crises in 2008 and central government reduced spending further from 2010, leisure was treated differently. Responsibility for lidos was transferred to charitable trusts. Those that remained were preserved and saved by community groups or trusts and some local authorities, who understood their public value.
During the last two decades – and recently accelerated by the COVID-19 pandemic where outdoor swimming was one of the few activities allowed for a while – there has been a steady growth in outdoor, wild and lido swimming.
And there are cultural markers of a resurgence, too. Fashion label Radley created a limited-edition lido handbag in 2016. In 2019, crowdfunding helped create The Lido Guide. The same year, a heart-warming novel, The Lido by Libby Page, beautifully captured the community spirit, history and value of lidos.
Photographer Christopher Beanland paid homage to lidos in 2020 through a global collection of outdoor pools and their stories. And then this year, Brit Pop band Blur choose the iconic 2014 Martin Parr image of a solitary swimmer in Gourock Pool for the cover of their upcoming album, The Ballad of Darren.
Over 30 lido schemes have emerged from 2021 onwards. They’ve been nurtured by the Future Lidos Group and their National Heritage Lottery funded pooling resources project. The design emphasis is once again on innovation, taking the lessons of lido heritage and the human connection which formed in these inclusive sites into consideration.
If Sport England’s policies can recognise the diverse value of lidos to public health and leisure, the next decade could see a further resurgence in restorations. Even more lidos could soon be making a welcome return across Britain, allowing more access to outdoor swimming – whatever the weather.
Michael Wood founded the Future Lidos Group in 2021 and is a volunteer on the steering committee for the Pooling Resources project. The Pooling Resources project received funding from National Heritage Lottery Fund in January 2023 to create a toolkit to support the restoration and creation of lidos. He has been a volunteer with the Friends of Tynemouth Outdoor Pool for 9 years. He has not personally received any fees for any of this work.
When we think of what makes athletes great, few of us would think that sleep might play an important role. But many of the world’s best athletes say sleep is an essential part of their training routine and key in helping them to perform well.
Serena Williams, for example, strives to get eight hours of sleep each night. NBA star LeBron James aims for eight to ten hours per night, while NFL legend Tom Brady says he goes to bed early and gets at least nine hours of sleep.
It’s no wonder, since sleep plays a key role in metabolism, the growth and repair of tissues (such as our muscles), and ensures memory, reaction time and decision making are all working optimally. All these processes impact sporting performance.
But it isn’t just athletes whose athletic performance can benefit from proper sleep. Even amateur gym-goers can maximise the benefits of exercise for their fitness and health by getting enough good sleep each night.
Here are just some of the ways sleep benefits your fitness:
Exercise is great for improving aerobic fitness. It improves both aerobic capacity (being able to run or cycle faster with a heavier load) and efficiency (meaning your body requires less oxygen to run or cycle at the same pace).
One contributing factor to improved aerobic fitness is the function of the body’s mitochondria. Mitochondria are small structures within the cells of the muscles that are responsible for creating the energy the muscle requires during exercise.
Research shows that poor sleep (getting only four hours a night for five nights) can reduce the function of mitochondria in healthy participants. High-intensity interval training was shown to alleviate these impairments in the short-term (over a five-day period). But, it’s currently unclear how these impairments would influence adaptations to exercise in the longer term, so it’s best to get a good night’s sleep if improving aerobic fitness is one of your goals.
Sleep is also important if you’re looking to build strength or muscle.
Muscle growth occurs when new proteins are added to the muscle structure – a process known as “muscle protein synthesis”. This process is stimulated by exercise and food (specifically protein) intake, and can last at least 24 hours after a workout.
Research shows that even just a few nights of insufficient sleep reduces the muscle protein synthesis response to nutrient intake. This suggests that poor sleep may make it harder for the body to build muscle.
Hormones act as chemical messengers that contribute to a range of functions throughout the body, such growth and development of tissues. Hormones which are involved with these building processes can be termed “anabolic” hormones.
Two anabolic hormones – testosterone and growth hormone, which are released during sleep – may also be important for recovery from and adaptation to exercise. These hormones have multiple roles in the body, and are linked to improved body composition (lower body fat and higher muscle mass). A higher amount of muscle mass and lower body fat can be beneficial for exercise and health.
When sleep is restricted to only five hours per night (similar to the amount of sleep many working adults get), testosterone levels are reduced in healthy young men. Sleep restriction of a similar duration also alters the release of growth hormone during sleep. While more research is needed, there’s a potential that these hormones may play a role in mediating the relationship between sleep and fitness, due to their link to improved body composition.
Exercise often uses glucose (sugar) as a fuel source. Muscles store glucose from the foods we eat in the form of glycogen to meet the demands of exercise. Replenishing glycogen stores after exercise is a key part of the recovery process. It can take up to 24 hours to fully replenish stores, with the correct nutrient intake. The hormone insulin can be needed for muscles to absorb glucose in order to make glycogen.
Numerous studies show that insufficient sleep reduces the effectiveness of insulin. This could impact on the body’s ability to replace glycogen stores, with one study revealing reduced muscle glycogen stores after a night of sleep deprivation.
Depleted glycogen stores can impair subsequent exercise performance in the short and long term, so it is important to ensure glycogen stores are replenished after exercise.
Sleep is clearly important for your fitness, so here are some ways to ensure you get proper sleep each night:
If you are trying to improve your fitness make sure you’re getting enough good quality sleep – aim for at least seven to nine hours of sleep each night.
Emma Sweeney has previously received funding from the Waterloo Foundation.
Ian Walshe does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.
Seagrasses are flowering plants that form dense underwater meadows in coastal waters worldwide, from the frigid seas of the Arctic to the warm shallows of the Caribbean. These meadows provide a refuge for young fish, food for grazing sea turtles and manatees, and help to slow climate change by absorbing carbon from the atmosphere up to 35 times faster than rainforests.
In a new study, we discovered another reason to preserve the world’s remaining seagrass meadows: they can build and maintain coral reef islands.
Throughout the tropics, the breakdown of shells and skeletons belonging to organisms living on coral reefs has produced enough sand to form entire islands. These coral reef islands are inhabited by over 700,000 people globally in nations including Kiribati, the Marshall Islands and the Maldives. Our research showed that seagrass meadows can make the right type of sand for building and maintaining the shorelines of these islands. This sand could help protect them from sea-level rise, which threatens the existence of low-lying nations.
Islands in the Maldives are primarily built from coral, but rising sea temperatures have caused reefs to bleach in recent years, which can kill corals. Seagrass may be vital for building and maintaining these islands in the future if reefs are lost to climate change.
If you are ever lucky enough to swim in a tropical seagrass meadow, take a close look at the leaves. You may notice that, instead of being completely smooth and green, there are what look like white grains of sand stuck to their surface.
A microscope reveals that these white grains are in fact tiny plants and animals. These creatures – scientists call them seagrass epibonts – are made of calcium carbonate and can include sea snails, single-celled foraminifera, crusts of coralline algae and colonies of invertebrates called bryozoans.
Some epibionts fall off the leaves or are whisked away when the seagrass dies to be deposited with other sediment on nearby islands. Over time, this accumulation helps to build and maintain the island shorelines. In our study, we aimed to find out how much sand was produced by organisms living in a seagrass meadow in the southern Maldives.
We used satellite images to map the density of seagrass and counted the leaves by randomly placing grids on the seafloor. We repeated this process 300 times, counting 27,528 individual seagrass leaves – not how most visitors to the Maldives spend their trip.
We collected 400 leaves and analysed them in a laboratory to work out the mass of epibionts living on them. The sand samples we collected from the meadow indicated how many of these organisms were the right size for building an island (between 0.063 and 2mm).
The rate at which different parts of the meadow produced sand-sized grains ranged from 0.22 to 0.86kg per square metre per year. Across the 1.1 square kilometres of seagrass meadow we studied, total annual sediment production was 762,000kg, with 482,000kg of this being the right size for island-building.
The volume of sand-sized sediment produced across the meadow would be large enough to build the neighbouring island of Faathihutta in just 18 years. Not all of this sand will go on to build islands – some will remain in the ocean. Nonetheless, this is a huge volume of sand being produced near islands in desperate need of sediment to bolster shorelines threatened by rising seas.
Reef island nations will need to protect seagrass meadows and aid their recovery in areas where they have been damaged. Another challenge will be ensuring that the movement of sand from seagrass meadows to islands is not obstructed by sea walls, harbours or jetties.
The societal benefits of seagrass meadows remain underappreciated. In the Maldives, seagrass is often removed from tourist resorts to meet visitor expectations of pristine white sands. This is a misconception of what the shallow waters around tropical islands are supposed to look like – and one that deprives visitors of the wide variety of marine life that call seagrass meadows home, such as schools of baby fish, seahorses and turtles.
Tourists should now also be aware that the very survival of the coral reef islands may depend on the sand that these seagrass meadows produce.
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Holly East receives funding from the British Society for Geomorphology.
Jamie Johnson does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.
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