Part 3

_St. Giles’ and St. George’s, Bloomsbury, Swimming Baths_, Endell Street.—The first class bath has an oblong shape, broader at one end than the other. Its length is 12 yards by 10 at the deep end, tapering off to 8 at the shallow end. Depth from 4 ft. to 6 ft. Sides lined with white porcelain tiles with round black spots at angles, a blue pattern on top row. Bottom of white glazed bricks. Twenty-three open boxes, with mirrors and curtains, on one side and along the shallow end. A wide footway of slate on three sides of the bath. A spring-board at deep end. Pillars, of painted iron, round three sides of the bath, supporting the roof. A painted screen about 12 feet high separates this from the second class bath, which is in all respects the same as the first class, except that the boxes are not painted and have neither mirrors nor curtains. The two baths have a common roof of glass, very lofty, and with elegant iron-work supports. The water is clear and fresh, the ventilation and lighting excellent. This and the Tower Hamlets bath are the only ones in London where a middle-sized man can get out of his depth, which is a great charm to the practised swimmer.

_St. James’ Swimming Bath_, Marshall Street, Golden Square.—You mount up a flight of steps to get to this bath. It is about 13 yards by 9. Depth from 3 to 5 feet. Sides of bath slate, bottom plaster. Eighteen open boxes. A lofty ceiling, well lighted. The water is dirty looking, and the whole arrangements very inferior, and altogether second class.

_St. Margaret’s and St. John’s Swimming Baths_, Great Smith Street, Westminster.—The first class bath is 12 yards by 10. It is lined throughout, and for 3 feet above the water, with white glazed bricks. Depth from 3 ft. to 5 ft. 6 in. Boxes 16, open, with mirrors, in two tiers at the shallow end. A footway 6 feet broad in front of boxes, about 3 feet above the water, to which two flights of wooden steps lead down. A narrow gangway, about 6 feet above the water, leads to a door opening on to the second class bath, which is very similar to this, only 3 feet longer, and with double the number of boxes arranged similarly at either end. The walls, whitewashed, rise from the water on three sides. They support a lofty double sloped ceiling of painted wood, with glass let in along each slope. The water is clear, and the bath is tolerably well lighted and ventilated, but as it is deficient in everything ornamental, it has rather a mean appearance.

_St. Pancras Swimming Baths_, King Street, Camden Town.—The first class bath is 19 yards by 8. The corners of the bath are rounded. The sides of white porcelain tiles, the top row ornamented with blue dolphins. The bottom is of glazed black and white bricks arranged in a pattern. Depth from 3 ft. 4 in. to 5 ft. 5 in. A spring-board at deep end. The boxes, 25 in number, with mirrors and half doors, run down one side and along deep end. At the shallow end, and in front of the boxes, a footway of stone flags. At the other side runs a screen about 10 feet high, separating it from the second class bath, which is identical with it in all respects save the mirrors and dolphins. The two baths are covered, to the extent of one half, by a very lofty glass dome. The other half of the bath is overhung by a not very lofty ceiling of plaster and ironwork, with sundry round holes in it, displaying intricate conglomerations of iron pipes. The water is beautifully clear, and the lighting and ventilation good. It is one of the most recent of the parochial baths, and does great credit to the much-reviled St. Pancras Board of Guardians.

_Tower Hamlets Swimming Baths_, Church Street, Mile End New Town.—First class bath 23 yards by 10. Depth from 5 to 6 feet. The sides and bottom of bath of cement painted white. Forty-two unnumbered boxes, with doors which do not lock, and are cut away slightly at top to admit light, run along the two ends and one side of the bath. Above them is a gallery with seats, where more bathers or spectators can be accommodated. On the opposite side runs a gangway over the water, which can be used as a spring-board. The footway in front of the boxes is of stone flags. The walls, of brick, are whitewashed on the three sides where the boxes are, with some attempt at colour near the top, and a gorgeous Royal Arms at one end. The other side is of wood painted, forming the partition between this and the second class bath. The roof is on the double slope, of wood, dark and grimy. Glass is let in at the top on both sides. The illumination is indifferent, the boxes rather rickety, and, on the whole, the bath, though extent and depth of water are satisfactory, is decidedly shabby. The second class bath is the same as the first, except that the boxes are open, 26 in number, and so much larger, that each box will accommodate on an emergency ten bathers. The proprietor informed me that he has seen 1200 bathers together in this bath, 500 or 600 in the water at one time. There is no attempt at colouring on the whitewashed walls, and the water is not so deep as that in the first class bath by half a foot.

Some of the above tepid swimming baths are open all the year round. Some, where there are first and second class baths, close one of these during the winter and strike an average of the prices of admission. Some close at the end of September, others at the end of October, to reopen in April. The prices of the swimming baths connected with the parochial baths and washhouses are usually 4d. for the 1st class and 2d. for the 2nd class. A few charge 6d. 1st class, some 3d. 2nd class, and one, the Marylebone, charges 8d. 1st, 4d. 2nd, and 2d. 3rd class. The non-parochial swimming baths, Kensington and Blackheath, are 1s. each.

Almost all the swimming baths are the head quarters of one or more swimming clubs, which generally have one night a week for their meetings and practisings. With few exceptions they have all attached to them a professional swimmer, in most cases one of the bath attendants, who teaches swimming to beginners and coaches aspirants after prizes in that extraordinary mode of rapid swimming adopted by the London aquatic athletes, in plunging, in picking up eggs from the bottom of the bath, and other equally useless feats. The shallowness of the baths prevents all practice of the really useful accomplishment of diving deep in water from a height or while swimming; and I am not aware of any instruction being given in the very difficult art of rescuing a drowning person. I need not say that this is a dangerous and difficult operation as long as the person to be rescued is able to struggle and clutch at his rescuer. It too often happens that the desperate efforts of a drowning person drag both himself and his would-be preserver to the bottom. In some books it is recommended not to attempt the rescue of a drowning man until he has ceased to struggle, when it may be too late. There is a method of grasping and supporting a drowning person, however lively, that should be taught to swimmers, which will enable them to save life without much peril to themselves; and this could be taught in our swimming baths, but no prizes are awarded for it, and professionals, for the most part, think only of teaching what will win prizes at the swimming competitions. By the way, either Shakspeare understood little about swimming or he intended to represent Cassius as a vain boaster, which, however, is hardly consistent with his character in the play, when he makes him talk about rescuing the drowning Cæsar by taking him on his shoulders as Æneas did Anchises.

The above, as far as I can ascertain, are all the places expressly constructed for swimming purposes at present existing in London,[3] and if they fully answered the ends for which they were designed, and enabled their frequenters to obtain the full benefit of the hygienic exercise of swimming, one could scarcely say that they were too few for even such an immense town. But they are of little use in a hygienic point of view. I must remind the reader that in order to derive the full health-giving advantages from swimming, it must be performed in cool and deep water, with plenty of room, and surrounded by the wholesome accessaries of fresh air and sunlight. Moreover, the mind of the swimmer should not be harassed and anxious. Now, the London swimming baths satisfy none of these requirements. They are, with one exception (for we cannot count the three ancient plunge baths among swimming baths, on account of their puny dimensions), all tepid. This is no fixed temperature, but varies in every bath, and in the same bath at different times. It may mean any temperature from 65° to 80°, or upwards. The lower temperature would not be objectionable in the point of view of salubrity, but it would not be relished by the swimmers, who would insist on more warm water being added, or otherwise the most of them would forsake the bath. When the water approaches the higher temperature indicated, swimming in it is followed by languor and prostration, more prejudicial to health than otherwise. To me the water in this state feels sodden and lifeless, and though one can stay in it a long time without shivering, the longer one stays in the more prostrated does one feel afterwards, and a good cold douche or shower-bath would be required to restore anything like tone to the system.

[3] There are, I believe, several additional tepid swimming baths in the course of construction in London and suburbs, and one has been recently opened at Stratford, but that town can scarcely be considered as part of London, though within the postal district, and as Mr. Sweedlepipe says, “we must draw the line somewhere.” Some may think I have not drawn the line narrowly enough, when I have included in my survey Hampstead, Hammersmith, Greenwich, and Blackheath, but I preferred to make it possibly too wide than to incur the reproach of having made it too narrow.

The London swimming baths are all shallow, with two exceptions, and these are only six feet deep at their deepest part. There is consequently no opportunity for diving deep and experiencing the powerful influence of the pressure of a considerable column of water on the organs of respiration and circulation.

With few exceptions the London swimming baths are too small. When any considerable number of bathers are in the water, then there is hardly room for the swimmers, who are consequently continually butting against, or kicking, or even scratching one another in a manner anything but favorable for the preservation of good temper—a most essential requisite in a hygienic point of view.

None of the London baths have the advantage of pure fresh air. Some of them are close, stuffy and fœtid. The best of them can only be said to be well ventilated, but no amount of ventilation in a covered building is an equivalent for the caller air with its fresh breezes, that play around and about the exposed body of the open air bather.

Few of the London baths have a sufficiency of light. Some are mere gloomy cellars. In the very best of them the body does not receive the direct rays of the sun, the light being transmitted through glass of greater or less thickness, often artificially dimmed, in case it should impinge too strongly on the exposed body. The powerful hygienic effects of light on the body have recently received much attention, and it is no doubt a chief agent in the salubrious influence of open-air bathing. To construct a swimming bath where the light is nearly excluded is to forego one of the greatest advantages of the bath.

Lastly, how can the mind remain free from anxiety, when, according to the arrangement in every bath in London, with one exception, the bather’s clothes and valuables have to be left in open boxes, to which any person can enter, while in most baths a notice is stuck up to the effect that the bath proprietor is not responsible for clothes or valuables, but that each bather must look after his own. In some of the baths the ticket givers will take charge of watches, jewellery, and money, but in many others they refuse to do so, and one is forced to leave everything exposed. With this alarming notice staring one in the face, what must be the state of mind of a timid bather under such circumstances, when the bath is tolerably full of the extremely mixed company which frequents these baths, I shall leave the reader to imagine. Certainly if the conditions were otherwise hygienically good, the moral state thus induced would suffice to neutralize them.

Besides the above swimming baths, cold and tepid, under cover, and not to be enjoyed without payment, London has, or had, two large open-air gratuitous swimming baths, fulfilling in many respects the requirements of hygienic swimming baths, but objectionable in several important particulars; I allude to the great bathing lake in Hyde Park—the Serpentine, and the two smaller lakes in Victoria Park.

_The Serpentine_, before the “levelling-up” operations commenced, was in very bad repute. Its depth was supposed to be very great in some places; a delusion its drainage has dispelled, for it appears to be nowhere above 12 or 14 feet deep. Its bottom was supposed to be foul with the accumulated sediment from the sewers which discharged themselves into it for many years; its drainage has shown it to be foul beyond all conception, and the wonder is that its water was not more impure than we know it to have been, resting on such a thick stratum of abominations. The water was impure,[4] there is no denying it, and its impurity was often as obvious to the nose as to the eye. And yet a swim in the old Serpentine on a cool spring or autumn morning was not a bad thing—_experto credite_. It was a fine expanse of water, with beautiful surroundings. The eye rested with pleasure on the green sward of the park, the stately old elms, the picturesque bridge, the pretty little Swiss boathouse, and the monstrous black Duke prancing over the trees. Then if you did not examine too minutely the green confervæ that rendered the water almost opaque, if you kept your eyes more skyward, if you became used to the faint ditch-water smell around you, and “made believe a good deal,” you might almost fancy yourself disporting in a retired lake far away in the country. The company was not so bad as was usually supposed. The roughs don’t like getting up early even to wash themselves, so there were few of them; they mostly deferred their bathing till the evening. Most of the bathers seemed quiet, steady, respectable people. The regular bathers would generally bring along with them a bit of carpet, or hire a rug from the Humane Society’s boatmen to lay their clothes on, and thus save them getting wet by the dew. There was room and to spare for all on the broad bosom of London’s great lake, and when you could forget the stories about the horrors below you, and refrain from looking too curiously at the green abominations that thickened the water, a long swim in the deep placid Serpentine, with the sun shining down on you, and the gentle breeze fanning you, was infinitely preferable to any cold or tepid swimming bath in London. If the lover of the swimming bath is to gain nothing by the works now going on in the Serpentine besides clear water in a shallow bed, he will, perhaps, rather regret the loss of his deep but dirty lake. Bathing was permitted in the Serpentine from 5 to 8 a.m., and again after sunset for an hour or so; but no provision at all was made for the accommodation of bathers, beyond a couple of boats belonging to the Humane Society stationed near where most bathers resorted.

[4] I suppose it was this impurity of the water which produced a remarkable disease among the young sticklebacks and minnows, many of which I have found with deposits, apparently of pus, on various parts of their bodies, rendering their movements languid and awkward, and in some cases, especially where these deposits were on the head, causing hideous disfiguration.

_Victoria Park Bathing Lakes_.—There are two of these lakes. The more easterly one is nearly 300 yards long, and is surrounded by a gravel walk, beyond which are shrubs. The more westerly one is nearly as large, and is more hemmed in by trees and shrubs, and has several islands in it. Both have a depth of 6 feet in their deepest part, becoming gradually shallow towards the shore. The eastern lake is much the clearest. There is a raft on one, and a small shabby bathing house on the other. A swimming master resides at one end of the eastern lake, who apparently adds to the profits of his profession by selling ginger-beer and sugar-plums. The time when bathing is allowed is from 4 to 8 a.m. The remainder of the day the best of the lakes is much resorted to by the owners of miniature yachts, in order to test the sailing powers of their tiny craft. There is, of course, here also no arrangement for the safe bestowal of one’s clothes while one is in the water, so that, as in the Serpentine, you bathe at your own proper peril.

The lakes in these two parks are the only places in which the inhabitants of London are permitted to indulge in open-air bathing.[5] To be sure there is the river, and there are numerous canals in which the gamins plunge in summer, but they do so at the risk of being seized by the police and brought before a magistrate charged with the heinous offence of indecency, so that all who have any respect for the law are practically debarred from making use of these waters. Besides, in spite of the recent drainage works, the Thames is still little better than an open sewer, and it will be long before it is anything else;[6] and the canals are, with few exceptions, so dirty, that there is little inducement to the respectable swimmer to brave the terrors of the law, and defy the threats against trespassers, in order to indulge in his favorite exercise in either river or canal. So, practically, he is limited to the Serpentine and Victoria lakes, and to these only at the inconvenient hours, and under the uncomfortable circumstances I have described.

[5] I do not forget the lower ponds of Hampstead, which were once magnificent sheets of water, but then they were the property of the New River Company, and bathing was strictly prohibited in them. Now they seem to be abandoned by the Water Company, but they have been allowed to drain away or evaporate, until they are little better than muddy pools with a broad margin of sticky clay which would deter any one except a London street Arab from attempting to bathe in them. It would be possible to convert one or more of them into excellent swimming baths of any required depth.

[6] Were the Thames once more the “crystal stream” that poets used to call it, I fear its tidal character would offer some difficulties to placing on it, between the bridges, floating baths, such as we see on the Seine; for these, if placed near the side, would be left high and dry at every ebb, and, if stationed in mid-stream, would seriously interfere with navigation.

While almost every second-rate continental town has ample provision for open-air bathing, it is disgraceful that a large and wealthy metropolis like London should virtually have nothing of the sort. How much pleasure do its citizens consequently lose! what a powerful hygienic agent are they not deprived of! And yet London offers more facilities than almost any other town I know of for the construction of open-air swimming baths of the best kind, and that without infringing on the comfort or privileges of any one. In the Serpentine, when the levelling operations are completed, the finest swimming baths the world can show might be constructed for a very small sum of money, and I venture to say that while the convenience and wishes of thousands who delight in swimming, and to whom an open-air bath is a source of health and pleasure, would be gratified, no person would be inconvenienced, nor would anything unpleasant be presented to the eye.

The arrangements heretofore in force pleased no one; the bathing public were put to every sort of inconvenience, and the non-bathing public were disgusted that for certain hours in the day the banks of the Serpentine should be handed over to a horde of naked savages, rendering it impossible for any decent female to venture near them. It is surely the duty of the authorities who permit bathing in the Park to provide that it may be done with safety and comfort, and without outraging decency.