It was just a few days before that a-ha concert that never was that I was up on Tyneside, stamping all over my old stamping ground and throwing snowballs off the Tyne Bridge.
While I was there, I took the metro out to Whitley Bay and walked down to Tynemouth, where I found this sorry looking swimming pool on the beach, filled with rocks, sand and some snow:
Some history:
At the Southern end of Tynemouth Longsands beach, on the North East coast, lies the decaying remains of Tynemouth Outdoor Swimming Pool. A concrete, rectangular, salt water tidal pool, built in the 1920s. Popular with locals and holiday makers alike for over 50 years. It began to lose favour in the late 70s with the introduction of cheap package holidays abroad, just as other British coastal holiday destinations lost out.
The pool fell into disrepair, and in the mid 90s the Local Authority demolished the ancillary buildings and bulldozed the rubble into the pool, at a cost of £200,000, before filling with concrete and imported boulders to form an artificial ‘rock pool’. The anticipated marine life they introduced never flourished and the pool remains an eyesore to this day.
Not great.
But there is some good news: some form of early regeneration has begun!
Digging has begun at an abandoned outdoor swimming pool which campaigners hope could be restored to its former glory.
Campaign group the Friends of Tynemouth Outdoor Pool is carrying out a survey to find out what the pool tank was filled with when it was decommissioned.
Hopefully, one day, it will look like this:
That’s some distance off at the moment, but surely anything to make the Tynemouth pool look in any way different from its current state will be an improvement.