Water treatment: diving into the Firth of Clyde

Built in 1909, Gourock Lido was one of the earliest expressions of the sudden rush to build outdoor pools in Britain in the 1920s and 1930s. From the poolside, the swimmer can survey the regional environment of Glasgow and its hinterlands, follow the trajectory of the flows of water from Highland hills and streams, into the great municipal reservoir at Loch Katrine and on through the taps, toilets, and factories of the city, finally pouring down into the great bowl of the Firth of Clyde. Outdoor pools offer ‘domesticated leisure’, fuelled by the willed suspension of disbelief by the swimmers who maintain an illusion of privacy and social distance from others despite the crowds of half-naked bodies in very close proximity to one another. Floating in treated water, its chemical salty tang engulfing the swimming body in the outdoor breezy setting, is the essence of the strange experience of Gourock Pool, offering solace to the private body seeking its own paths through the overwhelming contemporary public spaces of health, leisure, and organised fun. Its anachronism means that it is also a permeable space in which history and the present can both intrude. If the wild swimmer is a solitary and often elitist figure with a polarised view of nature ‘out there’, we can find instead in endangered outdoor pools, and their gulps of weird water, an alternative municipal nature where we might test out subjectivity against all those other narratives of place, nature and identity, held in the medium of its waters. The pool, I argue, is a fortunately compromised space that offers in its contradictions a way to examine how on earth we might negotiate our way towards a humane urban cultural environmentalism