Three places to swim outdoors and beat the summer heat.

Mr Jack Overhill was a 20th-century author of 30-odd unpublished novels and the person who helped to inspire Britain’s lidos. He popularised the unknown front crawl stroke after noticing a swimmer outpacing a punt somewhere close to Grantchester, Cambridgeshire, in 1920. With its speed and efficiency, the stroke caught the imagination of the popular press. This new-found passion for swimming in England led to diving boards being nailed above any viable expanse of water. By 1931, 1,400 swimming clubs had been founded, a five-fold increase in two years, as Mr Roger Deakin’s open-water swimming bible Waterlog reports.

Cities responded to the fad and built beautiful pools, distilling the municipal pride of the town halls of the time, often making use of the bold curved style of the Art Deco. At Tinside in Plymouth, for example, built in 1935, the pool curved like the bow of an ocean liner and had a fountain in the centre. It was grandeur for all. Without Mr Overhill, the world’s lido users might never have had the chance to slake the summer heat in these bright blue lozenges (our favourites are listed below).

Today, as London and New York swelter in prolonged heatwaves, the lido seems less like a municipal gift and more like divine kindness. If you want to visit Tooting Bec Lido or Parliament Hill or the Hamilton Fish Park Pool in Lower Manhattan, get there early because they are no longer just places for the dedicated to exercise, but for whole cities to cool off. And whole cities often seem to be passing through the turnstiles: the middle-aged exerciser, the courting teenagers, the lonely dreamer.

It is not merely a matter of cooling the limbs. Lidos have a different meaning to every swimmer. Ms Joan Didion was obsessed with pools and water her whole life. “A pool is water, made available and useful and is, as such, infinitely soothing to the western eye,” she wrote. They were, for her, symbolic, not of affluence but of order. She was writing of Los Angeles and considering the pool as something that imposed order on the chaos of nature. For others, to swim is to escape, to encase oneself in water until the world is beyond sight and hearing. For Mr DH Lawrence, water had magical qualities. “Water is H2O, hydrogen two parts, oxygen one,” he wrote, “but there is also a third thing, that makes it water, and nobody knows what that is.”

Whether it be in lidos or other stretches of water, many more prominent poets and writers have focused on swimming in their work. Dame Iris Murdoch, the great 20th-century novelist and philosopher, wrote, “On hot days in the Oxford summer, my husband and I usually manage to slip into the Thames a mile or two above Oxford, where the hay in the water meadows is still owned and cut on the medieval strip system. The art is to draw no attention to oneself but to cruise quietly by the reeds like a water rat.” (Although she goes on to describe manmade swimming pools, rather than natural bodies of water, as “just a machine for exercising in”.)

Mr Algernon Swinburne seemed to derive a singular gratification from being buffeted by the North Sea. And Lord Byron, who was knocking about before the advent of the municipal lido, counted outdoor swimming as one of his great passions. He famously swam up the Grand Canal in Venice. “I could swim for four miles, write a book, of which 4,000 copies should be sold in a day, drink four bottles of wine – and I forget what the fourth was, but it is not worth mentioning,” he said, as noted in Journal Of The Conversations Of Lord Byron.

The writer Mr Alan Hollinghurst has made the pool – at Hampstead Ponds in The Line Of Beauty and in a fictional London club in The Swimming-Pool Library – a place of electrified sexuality, following in the pathways of Mr Christopher Isherwood who, similarly, had only one thing on his mind in the 1920s and 1930s. One just has to take the plunge.

And so should we all on warm days such as these. As the Ancient Greek poet Pindar wrote in the 5th century BC, “Water is best.”

London Fields Lido, London

Recently renovated and heated to a bath-like warmth, London Fields Lido is a bit of aquamarine in the middle of an otherwise concrete Hackney. In the early morning, in summer, a queue comprising the committed, the enthusiastic and those who just can’t cope with this bloody heat snakes from its door.

better.org.uk

Piscine Joséphine Baker, Paris

Moored on the Seine next to the Bibliothèque François Mitterrand, this elegant floating lido is 25m long and 10m wide. In the summer, the roof peels back and people sunbathe on the deck. It is more French than a Gallic shrug.

piscine-baker.fr

Hamilton Fish Park Pool, New York

Located on the corner of Pitt and East Houston, the Hamilton Fish Park Pool is the perfect spot to cool off during the summer heat. Just be aware that this attracts an eclectic crowd of all ages keen to enjoy the Olympic-sized pool, which is another way of saying get there early or you haven’t got a cat in hell’s chance of getting a proper swim in.

nycgovparks.org

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