Last night saw a welcome reinstatement of the Friday evening swim – not that the last two Friday evenings haven’t been absolutely lovely, they just haven’t involved swimming. On the basis that as I’m still working in Borough I’m halfway to somewhere further south already I headed off to the Waterfront Leisure Centre in Woolwich. I occasionally played squash here with a bloke I met in a pub once when I was living in the Isle of Dogs, but that was in my pre pool project life & so clearly I had never bothered with the swimming pool.
Given that in theory I did actually know where the centre was I managed to take an enormously circuitous route to it from the train station, but once there I was struck by how open & colourful the whole pool environment was. The ‘real’ swimming pool & the ‘leisure’ pool are adjacent to one another & the high ceiling & many windows gave a real sense of space even though it was dark outside. I loved the green & yellow snake slide that winds its way in & out of the building. I was also oddly happy to see that the pool designers here had managed to incorporate some faux rock decoration. It wasn’t quite on the same scale as East Ham which really has set the pretend rock factor quite high. It did make me think, you don’t see a faux rock in 63 pools and then two come along at once!
A good start to the weekend which holds the prospect of an out of town swim on Sunday – a small step towards the potential continuation project once I’ve conquered London! First up though, I have to want to go & run 9 miles at some point today. I’ve already managed to find an excuse to move this from a morning activity to an afternoon one, this is not the route to a PB in Sheffield half-marathon which looms large on the horizon early next month.
all the pools in london 