We have plenty of pools, but wouldn’t an ice rink be nice
Worrying reports have emerged this week of 2,000 swimming pools possibly being closed across England by 2030.
If this comes to pass it would be even worse than library closures; and it isn’t just about finding another Adam Peaty. Swimming keeps people fit, thereby helping the NHS. Learning to swim saves lives. Simple.
However, in Sunderland we should largely, perhaps entirely, escape closures. The pools under threat are those built in the 60s and 70s which have not been suitably maintained.
This may bring reminiscences of Sunderland’s horrific High Street Baths. Anyone who remembers being sentenced to spending half-an-hour in there will know what we refer to.
If ever a place was subject to misplaced ah-those-were-thedays type sentiment, then this place, technically a “leisure” facility, was it (along with a nearby and equally dismal pub called The Old Twenty Nine).
Aside of the Dickensian squalor of the baths, apocryphal tales emerged of passing circus owners wishing to use it for temporary accommodation for polar bears; only to find the animals refusing to enter on the grounds that the water was just too nippy.
Today the Sunderland Aquatic centre is one of only six Olympic size swimming pools in England – and they even heat the water. But we still hear complaints that, other than there, we are poorly served by public swimming facilities.
Indeed, apart from firstclass pools in Hendon, Farringdon, Grindon, Washington, Hetton, Castle View, Grindon, Doxford Park, Peterlee and, coming soon, Seaham – what have the Romans ever done for us?
So hurrah for our swimming pools. What I would like to see, seeing as we all have a shopping list for the local authority, is an ice rink.
We haven’t had one for 20 years and, as the nearest such facility is 66 years old and in Whitley Bay. There is commercial potential for another rink.
If they can improve on the skates we used to hire at Crowtree, all the better (horrible, rigid plastic things that made you feel as if your ankles had been sandpapered).
Ice skating isn’t as important as swimming, nor, in my opinion, libraries.
But wouldn’t it be nice.