Pond life: The politics of Hampstead Heath’s swimming ponds
Hampstead Heath’s ponds are a wild swimming utopia, but politics bubble beneath the surface, writes Anna Moloney
Over the last 100 years, the ponds of Hampstead Heath have come to gain something akin to mythical status. On London’s hottest days, fair weather swimmers come from far and wide to queue, sometimes for hours, for one of the pond’s coveted spots. The Kenwood Ladies’ Pond in particular, arguably made newly famous to millennials by generational voice Dolly Alderton, has gained near cult-following, with multiple books and documentaries made to extol its virtues by its ardent disciples.
But not everything is always serene at the Heath. Indeed, just beneath the smooth surface of the bathing waters, politics are often bubbling.
How the ponds came to be a swimming haven
Dug in the 1600s, Hampstead Heath’s ponds were not originally dug with North London’s Wim-Hof-Method aficionados in mind, but rather the very practical matter of supplying London with water. By the late 1500s, the Great Conduit, an underground channel built in 1245 to funnel water from Tyburn to Cheapside (where a blue and gold plaque now stands to commend it at City PM’s local Tesco Express) had become insufficient to supply London’s growing population, leading to a 1544 Act which decreed that the City could make use of “dyvers great and plentiful sprynges at Hampstead Heath”.
Fast forward 100 years, and the springs were leased to the Hampstead Water Company, who dug the Hampstead Ponds for use as fresh-water reservoirs in the early 1700s. It took another 100 years or so for people to start bathing in them (which then consisted of ‘immersion’ over actual swimming), another few years for the practice to be formalised (1884) and we haven’t been able to pull ourselves out since, with Hampstead Heath’s swimming ponds – if the summer queues are anything to go by – now better attended than ever.
While there are around 30 ponds total on the Heath, only three are designated for bathing (one for men, one for women and one mixed), though on hot days more than one rebel swimmer can be sighted splashing straight past the ‘DO NOT SWIM’ signs at the others.
Turning a profit from a pond
In the beginning, swimming at the Heath was naturally free. Indeed, this was likely one of the main pulls for opting to get in a pond over a swimming pool. Such utopia, however, was not to last. In 2004, after five years of managing the grounds, Canada Corporation attempted to close the ponds on the grounds they were costing too much to run, along with concerns over health and safety. The swimmers were in uproar and a High Court battle ensued, with the judge eventually ruling in favour of the bathers and decreeing the ponds must be kept open. In order to do so, however, charges came in for the first time ever at the ponds, with dippers asked to fork out £4.50 per session, though this was to be to be ‘self-policed’.
Friction between locals and the Corporation seem to have remained ever since, with the Highgate Men’s Pond Association still running a Campaign Against Charging in response to the move, and Felicity Moir, co-chair of the Mixed Pond Association (MPA), told me many swimmers felt it had changed the “culture”, with regular swimming now too expensive for many. Meanwhile, a spokesperson for the Kenwood Ladies Pond Association said the group had “spent a great deal of time and energy opposing Canada’s enforced charging”, which included taking the City to judicial review due to their belief the charges discriminated against disabled swimmers. There is, of course, also just something deeply unromantic about buying a ticket for a pond.
But, to be fair, managing the bathing ponds has come to look very different from their inception (when the ‘facilities’ consisted of a bankside to put one’s clothes on) and the ponds didn’t exactly become an overnight money-spinner.
Figures for the current running costs of the ponds are not available, but numbers published for 2019 show the Corporation spent £747,000 operating the three bathing ponds and only made £67,000 back; turns out ‘self-policing’ had some flaws, with the Corporation estimating that only 3.7 per cent of bathing pond users had paid the charge. Duly, in 2020, the fee was made obligatory (kicking off another High Court battle, this time ruled in favour of the Corporation) and an online booking system (akin to getting Glastonbury tickets on a sunny week) was brought in. By 2019 attendance figures, the obligatory charge should mean the ponds are generating around £1.8m annually – not bad for a muddy bit of water.
Hampstead Heath pond politics
And what about the rest? Gender politics have unfortunately recently erupted at Kenwood Ladies’ Pond, the only women-only wild swimming spot in the country, with a motion proposing that “only those born female in sex can use the pond” tabled at an association meeting earlier this year. Despite some “disruptive behaviour” reported, in the end, the motion was “resoundingly defeated”, though a few protesters from outside the group have not left the issue alone, with a barricade erected last month at the pond’s entrance by members of Women Holding the Line who wish to exclude trans women from the pond.
Luckily, association issues are usually more parochial. Proposed plans to build a sauna by the Mixed Pond, for example, caused rather the hooha last year – “What’s next? An underwater disco?,” swimmers reportedly fretted – while opening times during the winter are also routinely warred about.
What’s clear, however, beneath all the politics is a community of swimmers who believe the ponds should be available to as many as possible. Moir tells me while the ponds may have recently become more popular with a younger, fashionable set, the stalwarts, who take to the ponds all year-round, remain the old-timers. There’s some rivalry between ponds, Moir concedes, though they all invite each other to their parties; Harry Styles was even rumoured to be in attendance at the Ladies Pond’s annual Shared Breakfast last year.
As for teasing out more celeb gossip, Moir won’t comply, telling me the pond is really about connections building up silently: “Friendships build up around swimming together and not talking, so we know each other but not about what we do or who we are. That is the joy of sharing such an idyllic space. Everyone is the same with their clothes off.”