The rising popularity of outdoor and open water swimming has seen ever more people heading to rivers, lakes and lidos to cool off during the summer months. But for some, cold water swimming is a year round pastime.
26 August 1875: Captain Webb swims the Channel - Beef tea and brandy sees the swimmer through more than 20 hours in the water.
6 July 1904: The great Gadsby - ‘One-legged men...move at less disadvantage, relatively to bipeds, in water than on land.’
26 December 1911: The Serpentine’s hardened swimmers - ‘men appear on the Hyde Park banks, plunge in and swim their hundred yards, even though they first must break the ice with a hatchet.’
24 July 1930: Women and lidos ‘for the first time women have been allowed to swim openly and without fear of arrest in the holy waters of the Serpentine.’
19 May 1934: Swimming bath purity - ‘a rigid standard of the purity of the water’ must be insisted upon. An issue that continues to this day.
17 August 1935: New enthusiasm for the water and the sun - Increasing vogue for ‘swimming pools surrounded by pleasure parks and popularly known as “lidos”’.
14 November 1959: Cold comfort for the tarn-baggers - ‘shivering in a shower of hail, they scrambled out of a tarn high on a shoulder of Esk Pike [in the Lake District] and shook hands.’ Thus began the practice of tarn bagging.
25 July 2013: The world’s best outdoor pools in pictures.
26 August 2013: The UK’s best outdoor pools in pictures.
2 March 2015: Lewis Pugh’s Antarctic swim.
Outdoor swimming has featured in many books and films. There are memorable scenes in literature while one of the most popular non-fiction books is Roger Deakin’s Waterlog.
