by Roger Deakin
I travelled as often as possible by bike, the natural complement to swimming, and my selection of pools was highly random, although admittedly biased towards the open air. The opportunities to swim outdoors in London are getting increasingly rare. There are now only three lidos left, at Tooting Bec, Parliament Hill Fields and Brockwell Park. The only access to wild swimming is at the Highgate Men’s, Ladies’ and Mixed Ponds on Hampstead Heath, and the Serpentine in Hyde Park. Apart from three or four remaining outdoor public baths, that’s about it – unless you’re lucky enough to be invited to swim in somebody’s private pool as I had been, in Highgate, a month earlier.
My friend Lucy had recently moved from a sixteenth-century house in Walberswick to an elegant flat high up on the fourth floor of one of the great buildings of the 1930s: Berthold Lubetkin’s celebrated High Point in Highgate. Lucy is a serious swimmer and I had wondered how she was going to cope with the sudden loss of the sea. Earlier in the year I had secretly marvelled at her courage and dash as she led the way off Walberswick Beach, swimming fast out to sea in a straight line towards the horizon. I did my best to keep up, mistakenly imagining she would pause and turn back at any moment. We were some way out in the grander swells of Sole Bay before Lucy, cool as a cucumber, enquired if I thought we should head home for tea. ‘Might as well carry on to Amsterdam,’ I gulped, feeling grateful to have a distant, intermittent view of the beach in my sights, just visible over the tops of the breakers. How on earth was she going to survive four floors up in Highgate?
I had found my answer when I peered gingerly from the vertiginous balcony. Looking down into the gardens I caught sight of the ripple and glint of a swimming pool over in one corner beyond the tennis courts. Lubetkin, who also designed the Penguin Pool at London Zoo, had strong views on the civilising influence of swimming, and the pool was central to the whole novel concept of High Point. Consistent with the modernist ideas espousing open-air recreation and exposure to the life-giving properties of the sun, the inhabitants of the three white towers of flats were to have their own heated open-air pool where they might meet and mingle with their neighbours in an informal, even playful atmosphere, much like the penguins at the zoo. An outdoor pool on the doorstep is such a perfect antidote to the enclosed, even claustrophobic, interior of a flat: in an ideal world every block or estate would have one. I’ve noticed that a lot of the regular swimmers at the Parliament Hill Fields Lido live in the red-brick blocks of flats whose richly floral balconies overlook the pool from the edge of the Heath. Many of them swim between the hours of seven and nine in the morning, when entrance is free.
After dinner we had taken our towels and walked down through the giant ocean liner foyer, crossing lawns down curving concrete paths similar to the spiralling penguin promenades at the zoo, and ducking weeping willows. The pool lay hushed and steaming in the night air, dimly lit by a single floodlight at one end.
By the time we were into the black water it was just after midnight. There would have been a moon, but there was too much cloud. Nosing through the luxurious water, we swam under a faint curtain of rising steam that hung just an inch or two above the surface. The pool is heated by the same boilers that supply central heating to the flats and is simply one of the basic services supplied to leaseholders. It opens on 1 May, and this was a last chance to swim before it was closed for the winter the next day. It is about forty-five feet long, and the same rectangular shape as everything else in Lubetkin’s design: the rooms, doors, windows, even the counter of the Porter’s Lodge. Overlooking it is the perfect flat for a swimmer, upstairs above the changing rooms. The High Point residents hold their pool very dear, and can swim at any hour of the day or night.
The pool is surrounded by herbaceous borders and trees, and York-stone paving stones that are kinder to the feet than the regulation concrete slabs. Nearly all the High Point people swim in here. The Jewish ladies in red jackets with big gold buttons come down in the afternoons, and so does the successful architect who owns a Lubetkin flat much as other people might own a Stubbs or Hockney. There is a modest list of rules: ‘No ball games, no dogs . . .’ I can think of no greater luxury than swimming outdoors at night in gently mulled water when there’s a chill on the air. It is like being tucked up in bed on a frosty night with the window ajar. The effect intensified as a light drizzle began to pock the surface. We stole up and down, only the slap of our bow-waves in the plug hole at the deep end betraying our presence. I suppose the people in the upstairs flat are used to swimmers, like living next to a railway and not noticing the trains.
Lubetkin’s Penguin Pool, built three years earlier in 1934, was not only the first piece of modern architecture in Britain to hit the headlines and capture the popular imagination; it is still probably by far the most exciting swimming pool anyone has ever built. More than that, it is a bold experiment in community housing for a little society of birds that look and behave very much like people. I had left High Point that night determined to go and see it for myself.
On Sunday afternoon, I biked through Regent’s Park to the zoo and made my way to the Penguin Pool past a gorilla having a think inside a plastic barrel, like Diogenes. There was the famous elliptical enclosure, its delicate bands of curving concrete gleaming white in the sun. I squeezed through the crowds to look in through the proscenium arch of this living theatre at the penguins, sunning themselves in their dinner suits on the twin cantilevered spiral ramps that caused such a sensation in the architectural world when they were built in 1934. They were engineered by Ove Arup, and indicate his close involvement in the project with Lubetkin. They dramatically demonstrated the potential of reinforced concrete as a new and poetic way of building that could flow and spiral like water. Each tapered ramp is between only 3 and 6 inches thick, with no intermediate support over a 46-foot span, yet it will stand the weight of 24 people evenly spaced along it. Such dramatic technical innovations, and the elegance of the Penguin Pool, must have had a tremendous impact on the public at the time. The clean lines, open plan and abstract simplicity of the construction afforded a glimpse of the possibilities of life for people as well as penguins in a new modern environment.
This was architectural showmanship on several levels. Lubetkin’s partnership, Tecton, had only just been formed, and the Penguin Pool and Gorilla House were their first two commissions. They were keen to show how their new ideas could work. But on another level, Lubetkin’s design expressed his conviction that a zoo should recreate ‘the atmosphere of the circus’. Like Sir Peter Chalmers-Mitchell, Secretary of the Zoological Society at the time, Lubetkin saw the relationship between the zoo animals and the public in terms of performers and audience. The ramps and steps, and the central pool, were meant to show off the two contrasting aspects of penguin behaviour that Lubetkin thought people would most appreciate: their comical walk, and their skilful swimming.
The enclosure is a stage set, and an abstract, surrealist one at that. Lubetkin had lived in Paris and knew Picasso, Braque and Cocteau. One of his commissions there, in 1927, had been to design a nightclub, the Club Trapèze Volant, for the circus artist, trick cyclist and cinema actor Roland Tutin. The club, with its climbing pole, suspended rings and flying trapeze, was a great favourite with the surrealist hoorays, and the equipment was in nightly use. It is long demolished, but the photographs immediately make you think of the circus, or the monkey houses in the modern zoo. The parallels between Lubetkin’s ideas of the zoo as spectacle and the subsequent evolution of ‘wildlife’ television need hardly be underlined.
A great deal has been written about the architecture of this pioneering pool, but amid all the talk of Euclidean geometry, double helixes and Constructivism, there is hardly a mention of the actual penguins. Lubetkin was a Marxist rationalist, schooled in pre-revolutionary Russia, and you would not expect him to entertain any romantic notions about animals. He had completed his original design for the Gorilla House at London Zoo in 1933 within the astonishing deadline of four days, without the
time to find out as much about gorillas as his perfectionism must have demanded. Apart from the pool’s status as a listed building and an undisputed miniature masterpiece, how did it suit the swimmers?
There were thirty-eight penguins in residence when I went to see them. It was two o’clock, and apart from a few serious swimmers most were sunbathing on the ramps or pottering about outside their nesting boxes. In their smart suits, the birds themselves could have been architect-designed. Their swimming is best described as underwater flying. They topple into the water (diving would be an exaggeration), and row themselves at speed with their flippers, using their feet as rudders. The elliptical pool only comes up to the keepers’ knees at its deepest and is only six inches at the two shallow ends. In the wild, penguins will dive to thirty metres. But as one of the keepers observed, that would be ‘a heck of a lot of water to clean out’. Penguins are torpedo-shaped, and are said to have inspired the design of modern submarines. With their black-and-white stripes, they look like dolphins when they swim. The gentoo penguins in Edinburgh Zoo are the best swimmers, leaping out of the water like porpoises to catch their breath without losing momentum at high speed.
The penguins in London Zoo are not king or emperor penguins as many people expect them to be. They are relatively short black-footed South African penguins, and most are hand-reared. One of their keepers, Paul, said life around the pool can be something of a soap opera. He knows them all by name; ‘Some you say hello to; some are your mates. Others aren’t so friendly; Ulrika can sometimes get a bit pecky, Jessica and Roy wouldn’t hurt a fly.’ They generally mate for life and live in established pairs with their own nesting boxes round the pool: Arnold and Vicky in Box 2, Kojak and Felicity in Box 3, Spikey and Wanda in Box 4. Wanda was named by Michael Palin, who adopted her and pays for her keep. Spikey is twenty-seven, a great age for a penguin. Twelve to fifteen would be a good age in the wild, but here they live longer. Beatrice is the oldest at thirty-three. Blind Pugh, who was Paul’s favourite, died a week before his twenty-eighth birthday. ‘He lived in Box 6,’ Paul told me, ‘and he was found lying by Box 5. He was on his way home and his heart just stopped. He’d had a really good innings. It was a sudden cardiac arrest, so he wouldn’t have known anything about it.’
There are occasional exceptions to monogamy amongst the poolside penguins. Like a man talking about his family, Paul revealed that: ‘We did have a female who wasn’t monogamous, bless her. Hookbill was a floozie; she was playing the field, and even ended up helping with the incubation of another bird’s eggs.’ Another penguin, Bog, was paired with Jodie, who got a fungal infection and had to go off to the zoo hospital. Bog thought she had died, went into mourning, then began courting a pair of widows, Heidi and Gabriella. He had picked up a penguin. As an available male, several of the younger unattached females also became interested in him. When Jodie returned from hospital, poor Bog didn’t know what to do. He would spend his afternoons sunbathing on the ramp with Heidi, then go down to the poolside to look in on Gabriella, who was by that time incubating a pair of eggs. Then he would return uncertainly to Jodie at the other end of the pool. As Paul said, ‘It was quite confusing for him.’
Another of the keepers, David, said all the penguins like to take an early-morning swim together, and another late at night or during the evening when there’s nobody about. He thinks they behave differently when they’re alone. Apart from going in the water to get fish at feeding time, they do seem to swim up and down the pool quite happily for exercise and enjoyment, just like us.
Penguin nests are even more modernist than Lubetkin. They have a nouvelle cuisine approach to nest building, constructing careful arrangements of three pebbles and a stick. The architect was very keen that the Tree of Heaven should be retained on the site beside the pool. He was right, because it stands beautifully for nature against the cool lines of his rationalist art. But as the keepers pointed out, it is also an invaluable source of that vital twig each penguin couple needs for its nest. They will spend hours underneath it, like shoppers in John Lewis, choosing the right one. The rate of fertility amongst penguins is naturally low, but the zoo usually manages to hatch two or three chicks each year. Some recent additions have been Rudolph, Tinsel and Noel. I suspect Paula Yates must be naming them. (Lubetkin would have opposed such sentiment. When he went off to farm in Gloucestershire in 1939, he refused to give his pigs names, calling them instead by numbers.)
The Penguin Pool is such an irresistible architectural metaphor that the magazine Mother and Child couldn’t help making the connections in November 1938:
How many citizens of London have brooded over the railings of that pool, envying the penguins as they streak through the blue water or plod up the exquisite incline of the ramp – and have wondered sadly why human beings cannot be provided, like the penguins, with an environment so well adapted to their needs.
The deep, natural water of the Highgate Men’s Pond the following day was considerably colder than the cosseted High Point pool had been at the end of September. It is a marvellous second-best to Highgate Ladies’ Pond for a swim. I say this on the authority of a number of female friends who swim there regularly (FEMALES ONLY, says an imposing notice). They argue that its waters must be the purest, because their pond is the highest in a descending series, and is fed straight from the springs at the top of the hill in Kenwood. A number of impressive eighty-year-olds swim there every day; indeed the only accident at the pond in recent years was when one of the octogenarians spiked herself on the railings whilst climbing in after hours.
There has been swimming at the Men’s Pond for over ninety years, and it rivals any of the London clubs for its conversation, atmosphere and conviviality. In a way, it is one of the London clubs, yet it is the very opposite of exclusive. Entrance is of course free, past a bench on the sunny hillside lawn inscribed in memory of a swimmer known by his friends at the Men’s Pond as ‘Goldfish’. In summer, this lawn is something of a gay hang-out, and all the more colourful for it. All human life may be there, but it is hardly the San Francisco Sutro Baths, where they used to advertise Friday night ‘Bisexual Boogies’ in the 1970s and ’80s. In the fenced enclosure, where the serious swimmers and sunbathers congregate, nudity is de rigueur. A notice says ‘Shuttlecock may only be played at the discretion of the lifeguards.’ Some sunbathe on towels spread on the concrete floor, some read, some play chess or work out with weights. Out on the springboards and in the water, costumes are compulsory. There are no longer any high boards. The Highgate Diving Club used to meet here in the 1930s to practise swallow dives from a tenmetre board. On 16 August 1930, they and the swimmers of the Highgate Lifebuoys performed in the first Aquatic Carnival here in front of 10,000 people. The fancy diving team executed such specialities as half-screw-, straddle- and pike-jumps, haunch-jumps and dives, and the balled-up, single-front somersault.
When I arrived inside the enclosure at half-past one, the swimming university was in full session, and I couldn’t help comparing the scene to the one at the Penguin Pool the day before. There were about a dozen of us altogether. Two taxi-drivers were discussing the perennial question of water temperature with some Hampstead types in their sixties. ‘It feels colder in today because the air is so mild,’ they said.
‘It’s really the length of the nights that cools off the water at this time of year,’ said an old chap with a white moustache from a far corner. ‘The days are too short to warm it up again.’
‘The pond goes down to about forty for the winter, and stays there,’ said another.
They all agreed that once it goes below fifty, you don’t notice much difference anyway. This, of course, was a swimmers’ version of the foundation of all civilised societies: talking about the weather.
I went out along the jetty to the pond. It is deep, up to twenty feet, and the water is green, smooth and cold. It is entirely natural, and samples are regularly tested for purity. It was icy cold, and I swam fast in a big circle round the buoys the lifeguards
use to moor their rowing boat, past an unconcerned coot or two, and back to the ladder, feeling what they call here ‘braced’. In summer, when the water is warm, this is a beautiful place to bathe more languidly beside the wooded banks.
Terry and Les, the two supervisors, relaxed in the window-seat of their shed overlooking the water. On the wall was a photograph of them standing on the ice in the middle of the pond, and another of swimmers splashing about in an ice-hole they had broken open. The lifeguards go in themselves at least once a week, ‘to keep acclimatised’, and rescue eight to ten people a year; ‘proper rescues, not false alarms’. Most of the fifty to sixty regular bathers come early in the morning. A lot of them are in their eighties and look sixty. They all put it down to the cold water, dashing the fifteen yards between the pond’s two jetties when the water gets really cold. Both Terry and Les agreed that ‘It’s the plunge that counts.’
33
STEAMING
London, 4 November
AS THE OWNER of Hampstead Heath, the City of London Corporation also owns and runs the Highgate Ponds, maintaining them for swimmers free of charge. It deserves the highest praise for this, and for sticking to its policy of keeping the Parliament Hill Fields Lido open, in winter as well as summer, for free swimming in the mornings from seven o’clock until nine. It is one of the few really great swimming pools left.
I went in next day with two or three dozen early-morning regulars, and for a glorious moment, during some lull in the proceedings, I had the entire sixty-seven yards of water to myself. The solitude lasted for a single blissful length. I was outnumbered two-to-one by lifeguards, and the magnificent pool was at its scintillating best. The great ice-cream fountain at one end sparkled in the sun, and there was an expectant air about the amphitheatre of paved terraces. I swam through the cold, polished water, each stroke cutting a perfect arc of tiny bubbles, everything in equilibrium.