The Jubilee Pool, Penzance: ‘Municipal modernity and faith in a brighter, more enlightened future’ UPDATE

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1930s, Penzance

I don’t normally update posts but four years ago, when I last visited the Jubilee Pool in Penzance, it was closed and storm damaged. A fundraising campaign was in place to secure its repair and re-opening.  Well, last week I saw that the campaign had succeeded magnificently so I’m pleased to add to that earlier post and bring things up-to-date. (The revisions are in italics.)

Jubilee Pool, August 2018

Municipal Dreams is on holiday this week but the Jubilee Pool in Penzance is so municipal and so dreamy it just had to be shared. Opened in 1935, the pool is maybe the finest of Britain’s open-air lidos – a beautiful Arc Deco memento of a municipal commitment to health, fun and modernity that illuminated an otherwise gloomy decade.

My original photos were taken in August 2014 and show the pool closed and awaiting repair.

Penzance became a borough in 1614 and seems over the years to have been a rather enterprising one – a reservoir to supply the town with water was constructed in 1759, the first gas lighting arrived in 1830. In 1849, the Corporation was one of the first to form a local board of health and numerous improvements followed.

The Prom: originally built in 1843, this is the 1896 renovation with pink tinted slabs to reduce glare, August 2018

Fishing, minerals and trade formed the basis of its early prosperity but the Napoleonic Wars (which prevented the wealthy travelling to watering places on the Continent) opened new possibilities as one commentator praised the town for ‘the mildness of its air, the agreeableness of the situation and the respectability of its inhabitants’. He dubbed it ‘the Montpellier of England’. (1)

The Corporation built a seaside promenade to the west of the town in 1843 and the first Borough Surveyor built wide new roads to its rear from the 1860s. The rail link to London established in 1859 made these aspirations to resort gentility far more realistic. The first large hotel, Queen’s, opened in 1861. In its interwar resort heyday, Penzance was hailed as the ‘Cannes of the Cornish Riviera’. (2)

To its working population, Penzance was less idyllic. Battery Square – an area of run-down cottages and industrial works to the south of the town centre and adjacent to the promenade – was ‘one of the slummiest parts of the town’. (3)

In 1933, it was cleared. In a couple of years, large new municipal housing estates were built on the outskirts of town but meanwhile the Corporation focused on Penzance, the resort. Where Battery Square stood, the Borough Surveyor, Captain Frank Latham, created pleasure gardens and – a sign of the times – a car park.

At this time, Penzance was also lamenting the ‘unkind act of nature’ which had destroyed ‘the lovely beach which once ran from the Battery Rocks to the Tolcarne river’. A solution suggested itself – a lido built on the Rocks themselves.

The view from Tolcarne towards Battery Rocks and the Pool, August 2014

In this, Penzance was following the fashion of the day: (4)

By the early 1930s, open-air pools had become emblems of municipal modernity and of faith in a brighter, more enlightened future, in much the same way as public libraries had become a generation or two earlier.

Undated photograph © Jubilee Pool Penzance Ltd.

The pools also reflected a greater independence enjoyed by women – a cultural shift but, in this context, a practical one too made possible by new swimwear designs which allowed them to take up swimming in addition to the more sedate bathing previously judged more seemly. 

Opening Day, 1935 © Jubilee Pool Penzance Ltd. 

As we saw in Victoria Park, East London, Herbert Morrison – leader of the Labour administration which ran the London County Council from 1934 – had declared London would be ‘a city of lidos’. In the year that the Jubilee Pool opened, the Tinside lido was opened in Plymouth, Saltdean in Brighton and open-air pools in Ilkley, Norwich, Peterborough and Aylesbury.

The Jubilee Pool was officially opened on 31 May, 1935. It was, the programme stated, ‘ the consummation of one of the most important projects undertaken by the Borough of Penzance’ . The celebratory prose went on to praise the clearance of the:

slum property that had marred the eastern approach to the Promenade – today this depressing and unattractive scene has been swept away and a complete transformation effected.

‘Professor Hicks’ takes the first plunge at the official opening © Jubilee Pool Penzance Ltd. 

A full programme of activities followed with the accompaniment of the Penzance Silver Band.  ‘Professor’ Hicks, ‘the Cornish Veteran’ and former West of England swimming champion whose swim career had begun in 1868 was present and his inaugural laps were followed by a ‘programme of aquatic sports and exhibitions’ including races for ladies and girls. The ‘Beauty Parade of Bathing Belles’ was perhaps less of a blow struck for feminism. 

Prices, at 6d (2.5p) for adults and 3d for children, were relatively high but more controversial to some was the fact that the pool was to be open on Sundays and Councillor Birch went so far as to proclaim that ‘people in favour of Sunday labour were tyrants’.  The Mayor himself declared he would rather the pool be permanently closed than open on Sundays but later took part in the opening ceremony nevertheless. By 16 votes to 9, the Council overruled the primarily religious objections to Sunday opening (4a)

Members of the Penzance Swimming Association and Water Polo Club, mid-1950s (?) © Jubilee Pool Penzance Ltd.

The Jubilee Pool was 330 feet long by 240 feet wide at its greatest extent, not the biggest of its time but, apparently, the largest by volume of water – seawater regularly replenished by seven sluice gates. The size was designed to meet national and international standards for swimming and water polo matches. 

August 2014

But beyond the dry detail, the pool is a thing of beauty, spectacularly sited on Battery Rocks with commanding views of Mount’s Bay, resting, in the words of the latest Pevsner:

sleekly like a liner at anchor projecting into the sea…a subtle Art Deco composition of curvilinear concrete terraces in cool blues and whites, separated to accommodate sunbathers below and spectators of the arena-like space within or views of the town without.

As the local press noted at the time, the pool wasn’t ‘only a fine piece of engineering’. It was also:

a work of art. The monotony of straight walls and right angles – the domain of the compass and ruler – has been entirely avoided. Instead there are graceful curves and pleasing lines.

The programme, in full awareness of these artistic credentials, commented conversely on ‘the cubist style … adopted in the interior in the matter of diving platforms and steps’. 

August 2014

The architect of this masterpiece was Borough Surveyor, Captain Latham. He usually gets a name-check in descriptions of the pool but I’m intrigued by him. He had been appointed to the post in 1899, aged 25. His rank came from a commission in the Royal Engineers during the First World War. He retired, awarded the Freedom of the Borough, in 1938 and died in 1946.

Captain Frank Latham

In his younger years, he had written The Construction of Roads, Paths and Sea Defence, published in 1903. That expertise was clear in the skilful use made of Battery Rocks for the pool’s foundations. The same local press report was pleased, more prosaically, to record that, as a result, the whole project cost £14,000 whereas comparable pools elsewhere had cost over £100,000.

St Michael’s Mount to the rear and war memorial to right, August 2014

Latham – as I imagine him, this practical man and local government bureaucrat – somewhere possessed the soul of an artist. The design of the Pool was inspired, so he said, by watching a gull alight on the sea. Its architecture is a beautiful confection of Modernism and Art Deco, typical of its time but all of its own and making superb use of its site.

August 2014

It represented too, in the fashion of its day, fresh air and healthy exercise. As the mayor opined at the pool’s opening, ‘there can hardly be any better form of bodily exercise than swimming’. In any case, he added, ‘people who live by the sea and those who live on the sea should be able to swim’.

But the pool – which had seemed such a benefit to the town and its inhabitants and visitors, ‘an event of the greatest importance’ as the headline proclaimed – had come by the 1960s to seem a ‘white elephant’.

The lido craze didn’t last. War broke out within four years. The post-war world of foreign travel and indoor leisure centres – and, always, the vagaries of the English weather – contrived to make these outdoor pools seem old-fashioned, even rather uninviting. Somehow, the Jubilee Pool survived but, by the 1990s a sceptical local council reckoned each swim cost the local ratepayer between £16 and £18 and the case for closing it seemed strong. (5)

The Friends of Jubilee Pool were formed in 1992 and they achieved their first victory in the following year when the Pool was Grade II listed. Major funding followed from English Heritage and the European Regional Development Fund and a grand re-opening took place in May 1994.

Now lidos and open-air pools up and down the country are enjoying a revival though many are still dependent on the voluntary efforts of local enthusiasts. The ups and downs of the Jubilee Pool itself continue. February’s storms caused significant damage to the Pool and have prevented its opening this year.

Catching the full force of a winter storm © The Friends of Jubilee Pool

The most recent news is positive, however. A joint bid from Cornwall Council, Penzance Town Council and the Friends of Jubilee Pool for £1.95m funding from the Coastal Communities Fund was approved by the Department for Communities and Local Government this month.

The Friends are continuing their own fund-raising campaign to ensure that the Pool will be reopened with a wider range of activities that should safeguard its future in years to come. Captain Latham and the enterprising councillors whose vision created the Jubilee Pool in the 1930s would be pleased.

2018

A £3m renovation programme, supported by the Coastal Communities Fund and matching funding from local authorities and the Friends of Jubilee Pool, was completed in 2016 and the pool reopened in May that year.

August 2018

The Pool is now owned and managed by the Friends of Jubilee Pool operating as a Community Benefit Society committed its survival as a community asset.  The latest stage in this is the drilling of a geothermal well to provide renewable energy which will enable part of the pool to be heated.  A fundraising share offer is in place to complement the grant funding provided by the European Union. (6)

August 2018

Finally, that future is properly supported by a celebration of the Pool’s past. ‘Jubilee Pool Stories‘ is a project to create a digital archive as well as new media work and exhibitions. If you’re interested or can contribute your own memories, please follow the link.  My thanks to them for providing the historic photographs included in this post.

Sources

The amended post benefited from an exhibition in the Penzance Exchange gallery, ‘The Jubilee Pool: Then, Now, To Come’, which is running till 22 September 2018.

(1) WG Maton in 1794, quoted in Peter Beacham and Nikolaus Pevsner, Cornwall (2014)

(2) JH Wade in 1928, quoted in Cornwall Archaeological Unit, Cornwall and Scilly Urban Survey Historic characterisation for regeneration: Penzance (September 2003)

(3) The quotations are taken from ‘An Event of the Greatest Important’, The Cornishmen, a June 1935 newspaper report republished online in The West Briton, May 27, 2010

(4) Janet Smith, Liquid Assets: The lidos and open air swimming pools of Britain (English Heritage, 2005) quoted in Tom de Castella, review, New Statesman, 29 August 2005

(4a) ‘Penzance Town Council. The Bathing Pool’, The Cornishman and Cornish Telegraph, 15 May 1935

(5) See Martin Nixon, ‘Jubilee Pool: Enormous Liability or Massive Opportunity?’ for some of this later history. The figures are taken from the de Castella review.

(6)  Visit the Jubilee Pool’s dedicated website for full details on past work and future plans.

With planning permission granted for the proposals, Dezeen have just published ‘Penzance could become “spa town of Cornwall” with revamp of art-deco sea pool’

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Municipal Saltash: a ‘Borough Town’

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1920s, 1940s, 1950s, 1960s, Saltash

Municipal Dreams is on holiday but, while some of you might come down to the West Country to lie on a beach, his relentless quest for all things municipal continues. The Cornish town of Saltash on the banks of the Tamar provided surprisingly rich pickings.

Saltash from the Brunel’s Royal Albert Bridge; Waterside in centre shot

Or perhaps not so surprising given its long history.  It might seem overshadowed by its bigger neighbour Plymouth nowadays but, as the locals will tell you: 

Saltash was a borough town, When Plymouth was a fuzzy down

And it’s true enough: Saltash was first incorporated in the late 12th century; its charter was confirmed by Richard II in 1382. That upstart Plymouth didn’t get its town charter till 1439.

St Nicholas and St Faith’s Church

This helps explain the longevity of Saltash’s first and most unusual piece of municipal history – the church of St Nicholas and St Faith, dating to Norman times, originally built as a chapel of ease to the nearby St Stephen’s but claimed as the ‘Corporation chapel’ – with the Corporation appointing its chaplains and deciding who got buried in the church – from the 17th century to 1881. It became the parish church of a new ecclesiastical parish coterminous with the borough in that year but the Corporation didn’t cede ownership of the building to the church authorities until 1924.  

The Guildhall

The Guildhall is a newcomer by comparison, built in 1775 as a Market House and Assembly Hall and not acquired by the Corporation until 1841. The ground-floor market area between its Tuscan colonnades was enclosed in 1910.  Grade II-listed and tastefully restored in 1999, it now provides a home for Saltash Town Council, a parish council formed when Saltash Borough Council was superseded by Caradon District Council in 1974 (itself replaced by the unitary Cornwall Council in 2009).

The Library

Cornwall County Council – which preceded the unitary authority (local government has got complicated nowadays) – built perhaps the most striking of Saltash’s local government buildings: its library.  Opened in 1963, the Library’s curved roofline sweeping up to a double-height frontage (all based, apparently, on the golden ratios of le Corbusier’s modulor system), was designed by Royston Summers of the County Architect’s Department.  To Pevsner, it’s ‘one of the most innovative of the County Architect’s post-war oeuvre’. (1)  

Two years earlier, a far larger and more unusual example of municipal enterprise had been opened – the Tamar Bridge.  Designed by Mott, Hay and Anderson, constructed by Cleveland Bridge and Engineering Company, the bridge – with its 1100 foot central span – the longest in the UK at the time, was commissioned by Plymouth City Council and Cornwall County Council.  

The Tamar Bridge with Brunel’s rail bridge to the rear.

Although the bridge was long overdue (the idea had been first mooted in 1823 and Brunel’s adjacent Royal Albert rail bridge opened as far back as 1859), in the Austerity Britain of the post-Second World War era, the Government had concluded this particular infrastructure project was too costly and the two councils secured parliamentary approval to proceed independently. Built at a cost of £1.5m without government subsidy (paid for by user tolls), construction began in July 1959 and the first traffic crossed in October 1961. (2)   

Housing is the usual focus of this blog and was once, of course, one of the major responsibilities of local councils.  Here, after a slow start, Saltash Borough Council had a major impact, transforming the town and in part (as we shall see) in ways which some would come to regret.  

The Council took so long to prepare a scheme under Addison’s 1919 Housing Act that spending cuts (the so-called Geddes Axe of 1921) halted construction before it began. The protest of one local councillor that this was ‘a dishonourable action the part of body of men who at the election taunted the electorate by promising them houses, and then threw their promises into their faces’ availed not a jot. (3)

The need for housing remained however. A 1923 report to council recorded 29 persons living in two houses in Fore Street; ‘in one room a woman, her son and his child were living, eating, drinking, and sleeping’. (4)

Lander Road

River View

It’s not surprising then that there were 106 applications for the Council’s first scheme – 18 houses built on Lander Road.  These were originally all planned as non-parlour homes but, in an interesting insight into the attitudes towards council housing at the time: (5)

the committee thought there might be people in the town who would like a better type of house.  They thought it was their duty to cater for the requirements of the whole of the population.

They ended up building ‘eight houses of the parlour type, eight of the non-parlour type and four of the flat type with separate entrances’.

Warfelton Crescent

By 1938, when the Borough had also built the much larger Warfelton Estate to the west of the town, it was claimed the council had built a higher proportion of council homes than any other in the West Country. (6)

In 1945, however, the Council applied for 60 Tarran-type prefabricated homes to partially address what was described as the town’s ‘dire housing need’.  Sturdier, permanent housing followed until, by 1950, the Council could claim that the ‘housing problem was nearly solved’, the waiting list reduced from over 1000 to 112. (7)

Liskeard Road, Burraton Estate

A total of 195 houses had been erected – 40 of these were prefabs and 12 flats, ‘the rest three-bed traditional houses’.  The prefabs were scattered around the town, most of the new houses on an extension to the Warfelton Estate.  The new Cowdray Estate contained 32 homes and new estates were underway or projected on Liskeard Road, Warraton and Burraton East.

With wartime replacement substantially complete, by the mid-1950s – like the rest of the country – Saltash turned towards the task of slum replacement.  Its obvious target was the Waterside area, huddled along the estuary beneath Brunel’s bridge – a mixed commercial and residential district: ‘a mixture of cottages and townhouses some as early as the sixteenth century, in a variety of styles and materials’. (8)

An undated, colourised postcard of the former Tamar Street

From a contemporary perspective, you might already be imagining the redevelopment possibilities and potential attractions of the area. Pevsner had already identified its picturesque quality: 

The thrill of Saltash is the excessive contrast between the small scale and the variety of the small shapes of the fishing town along the waterside and climbing up the steep hill, and the sheer height of the granite piers of Brunel’s Royal Albert Bridge. 

‘The Ferry Beach and Inn at Saltash, Cornwall’ as painted by JMW Turner in 1811. Now in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.

Images of old Waterside, the Passage House Inn and the former Tamar Street at bottom. Note the archway entrance shown at top right.

But the housing and its layout were clearly, in their then state, ‘unfit for human habitation’ and ‘injurious to health’ and declared so in the Waterside Clearance Areas declared in 1956 and the compulsory purchase orders which followed. The Saltash branch of Amalgamated Society of Woodworkers also took a practical attitude and expressed its support for the demolitions. (9)

The new estate under construction, seen as repair works are taking place on the Royal Albert Bridge. The old Mission Hall to the left was demolished in 1963 and replaced by modern premises for the Saltash Boys Club.

A rearguard action by the Old Cornwall Society to preserve the Passage House Inn – the last of Saltash’s arch houses and immortalised by William Turner in 1812 – received only lukewarm support from the Ministry of Works which promised Grade II status allowing demolition so long as the need were justified. (10)  

Tamar Street and the Royal Albert Bridge from the quayside

The pub survived (without its arch) firstly as The Boatman and now, as of the summer of 2015, the Just Be Coffee Wine Lounge. In aspirational Britain and in Cornwall where tourism is a mainstay of the local economy that fits well with the new hopes for the Waterside as an amenity area to attract visitors.  The redevelopment which did occur has come to seem a lost opportunity.

The 1584 archway incorporated into 10 Tamar Street

Still, this blog celebrates earlier visions and ideals and in the Britain of the 1950s and 1960s housing for the people was the great priority.  The clearance was drastic – only the three pubs survived of the area’s old buildings, one side of Tamar Street was demolished and large open areas created to the waterside.  

This fine waterfront site wasn’t treated as prime real estate for the wealthy or for commerce but as land for affordable housing for local people.  A remnant only of the area’s antiquity survives in the doorway dated 1584 incorporated into the council flat at 10 Tamar Street.  

The development, that touch notwithstanding, may seem at first sight quite plain.  Compared to the old jumble of streets and styles and ungraced by any patina of age, there’s nothing picturesque about it but then, for those that lived in its previously substandard accommodation, its ‘picturesque’ appearance was probably not their prime concern.

The Council had originally commissioned the Louis de Soissons partnership (he had been the chief architect of Welwyn Garden City) to design the new scheme but opted in the end for cheaper in-house plans drawn up by the Council’s surveyor. (11)  

Still, there is some thought given to its architecture, notably in the deliberate attempt to replicate a Cornish idiom with a varied use of granite and tile facings and light-rendered frontages.  Its clean and well-equipped modernity won’t attract tourists but must have been very welcome to new residents. 

Tamar Street: no. 10 lies at the top end; the former Passage House/Boatman Inn at the end on the right

Tudor Close

The first homes (allocated to families displaced by slum clearance) were opened in 1960 by the Conservative Minister of Housing of the day, Henry Brooke for whom Brooke Close in the scheme was named. The development as a whole was completed in 1962.

Brooke Close

More council housing was built in Saltash and much more could be written about the town’s long history.  Still, you can forgive Municipal Dreams for finding its story of municipal endeavour and achievement inspiring – a reminder what local government can achieve when empowered to serve its community.

Note

My especial thanks to the Saltash Heritage Museum and Local History Centre for their help in providing background and illustration to this post. Do visit their museum and archives.  I also enjoyed visiting Elliott’s Store run by the Tamar Preservation Society. Both are on Fore Street and both are run by hard-working local volunteers who deserve our support.

Sources

1. Peter Beacham and Nickolaus Pevsner, Cornwall, The Buildings of England (2014)
2. AJ Brown University of Bath, ‘The Tamar Bridge‘, Proceedings of Bridge Engineering Conference, 27 April 2007, University of Bath
3. ‘Saltash Finance. Housing Protest’, Western Morning News, November 10 1921
4. ‘Alleged Overcrowding’, Western Morning News,  September 12 1923
5. ‘Saltash Council’s Plans for Better Homes’, Western Morning News, March 11 1925 and Twenty New Houses for Saltash Council to Build a Better Type’, Western Morning News, April 15 1925
6. Western Morning News,  July 13 1938
7. ‘Housing Problem Near Solution’, Western Morning News, June 16 1950
8. Bridget Callard, Cornwall & Scilly Urban Survey, Historic Characterisation for Regeneration: Saltash (September 2005)
9. Saltash Borough Council Housing Committee Minutes, 28 September 1956, Cornwall County Record Office
10. AD1338/1, 1956 Correspondence re Passage House Inn, Cornwall County Record Office
11. Saltash Borough Council Housing Committee Minutes, 3 August 1956 and 28 March 1958, Cornwall County Record Office

The Jubilee Pool, Penzance: ‘Municipal modernity and faith in a brighter, more enlightened future’

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1930s, Penzance

Municipal Dreams is on holiday this week but the Jubilee Pool in Penzance is so municipal and so dreamy it just had to be shared.  Opened in 1935, the pool is maybe the finest of Britain’s open-air lidos – a beautiful Arc Deco memento of a municipal commitment to health, fun and modernity that illuminated an otherwise gloomy decade.

Penzance became a borough in 1614 and seems over the years to have been a rather enterprising one – a reservoir to supply the town with water was constructed in 1759, the first gas lighting arrived in 1830.  In 1849, the Corporation was one of the first to form a local board of health and numerous improvements followed.

Fishing, minerals and trade formed the basis of its early prosperity but the Napoleonic Wars (which prevented the wealthy travelling to watering places on the Continent) opened new possibilities as one commentator praised the town for ‘the mildness of its air, the agreeableness of the situation and the respectability of its inhabitants’.  He dubbed it ‘the Montpellier of England’.  (1)

The Corporation built a seaside promenade to the west of the town in 1843 and the first Borough Surveyor built wide new roads to its rear from the 1860s. The rail link to London established in 1859 made these aspirations to resort gentility far more realistic.  The first large hotel, Queen’s, opened in 1861.  In its interwar resort heyday, Penzance was hailed as the ‘Cannes of the Cornish Riviera’. (2)

To its working population, Penzance was less idyllic.  Battery Square – an area of run-down cottages and industrial works to the south of the town centre and adjacent to the promenade – was ‘one of the slummiest parts of the town’. (3)

In 1933, it was cleared.  In a couple of years, large new municipal housing estates were built on the outskirts of town but meanwhile the Corporation focused on Penzance, the resort.  Where Battery Square stood, the Borough Surveyor, Captain Frank Latham, created pleasure gardens and – a sign of the times – a car park.

At this time, Penzance was also lamenting the ‘unkind act of nature’ which had destroyed ‘the lovely beach which once ran from the Battery Rocks to the Tolcarne river’. A solution suggested itself – a lido built on the Rocks themselves.

The view from Tolcarne towards Battery Rocks and the Pool

In this, Penzance was following the fashion of the day: (4)

By the early 1930s, open-air pools had become emblems of municipal modernity and of faith in a brighter, more enlightened future, in much the same way as public libraries had become a generation or two earlier.

As we saw in Victoria Park, Herbert Morrison – leader of the Labour administration which ran the London County Council from 1934 – had declared London would be ‘a city of lidos’.  In the year that the Jubilee Pool opened, the Tinside lido was opened in Plymouth, Saltdean in Brighton and open-air pools in Ilkley, Norwich, Peterborough and Aylesbury.

The opening of the pool, 1935 © The Friends of Jubilee Pool

The Jubilee Pool was 330 feet long by 240 feet wide at its greatest extent, not the biggest of its time but, apparently, the largest by volume of water – seawater regularly replenished.

All my photographs were taken in August 2014 and show the pool closed and awaiting repair

But beyond the dry detail, the pool is a thing of beauty, spectacularly sited on Battery Rocks with commanding views of Mount’s Bay, resting, in the words of the latest Pevsner:

sleekly like a liner at anchor projecting into the sea…a subtle Art Deco composition of curvilinear concrete terraces in cool blues and whites, separated to accommodate sunbathers below and spectators of the arena-like space within or views of the town without.

As the local press noted at the time, the pool wasn’t ‘only a fine piece of engineering’.  It was also:

a work of art. The monotony of straight walls and right angles – the domain of the compass and ruler – has been entirely avoided. Instead there are graceful curves and pleasing lines.

The architect of this masterpiece was Borough Surveyor, Captain Latham.  He usually gets a name-check in descriptions of the pool but I’m intrigued by him.  He had been appointed to the post in 1899, aged 25.  His rank came from a commission in the Royal Engineers during the First World War.  He retired, awarded the Freedom of the Borough, in 1938 and died in 1946.

In his younger years, he had written The Construction of Roads, Paths and Sea Defence, published in 1903.  That expertise was clear in the skilful use made of Battery Rocks for the pool’s foundations.  The same local press report was pleased, more prosaically, to record that, as a result, the whole project cost £14,000 whereas comparable pools elsewhere had cost over £100,000.

St Michael’s Mount to the rear and the war memorial to the right

Latham – as I imagine him, this practical man and local government bureaucrat – somewhere possessed the soul of an artist.  The design of the Pool was inspired, so he said, by watching a gull alight on the sea.  Its architecture is a beautiful confection of Modernism and Art Deco, typical of its time but all of its own and making superb use of its site.

It represented too, in the fashion of its day, fresh air and healthy exercise.  As the mayor opined at the pool’s opening, ‘there can hardly be any better form of bodily exercise than swimming’.  In any case, he added, ‘people who live by the sea and those who live on the sea should be able to swim’.

But the pool – which had seemed such a benefit to the town and its inhabitants and visitors,‘an event of the greatest importance’ as the headline proclaimed – had come by the 1960s to seem a ‘white elephant’.

The lido craze didn’t last.  War broke out within four years.  The post-war world of foreign travel and indoor leisure centres – and, always, the vagaries of the English weather – contrived to make these outdoor pools seem old-fashioned, even rather uninviting.  Somehow, the Jubilee Pool survived but, by the 1990s a sceptical local council reckoned each swim cost the local ratepayer between £16 and £18 and the case for closing it seemed strong. (5)

The Friends of Jubilee Pool were formed in 1992 and they achieved their first victory in the following year when the Pool was Grade II listed.  Major funding followed from English Heritage and the European Regional Development Fund and a grand re-opening took place in May 1994.

Now lidos and open-air pools up and down the country are enjoying a revival though many are still dependent on the voluntary efforts of local enthusiasts. The ups and downs of the Jubilee Pool itself continue.  February’s storms caused significant damage to the Pool and have prevented its opening this year.

Catching the full force of a winter storm © The Friends of Jubilee Pool

The most recent news is positive, however.  A joint bid from Cornwall Council, Penzance Town Council and the Friends of Jubilee Pool for £1.95m funding from the Coastal Communities Fund was approved by the Department for Communities and Local Government this month.

The Friends are continuing their own fund-raising campaign to ensure that the Pool will be reopened with a wider range of activities that should safeguard its future in years to come.  Captain Latham and the enterprising councillors whose vision created the Jubilee Pool in the 1930s would be pleased.

Sources

(1) WG Maton in 1794, quoted in Peter Beacham and Nikolaus Pevsner, Cornwall (2014)

(2) JH Wade in 1928, quoted in Cornwall Archaeological Unit, Cornwall and Scilly Urban Survey Historic characterisation for regeneration: Penzance (September 2003)

(3) The quotations are taken from ‘An Event of the Greatest Important’, The Cornishmen, a June 1935 newspaper report republished online in The West Briton, May 27, 2010

(4) Janet Smith, Liquid Assets: The lidos and open air swimming pools of Britain (English Heritage, 2005) quoted in Tom de Castella, review, New Statesman, 29 August 2005

(5) See Martin Nixon, ‘Jubilee Pool: Enormous Liability or Massive Opportunity?’ for some of this later history.  The figures are taken from the de Castella review.

Do visit the Friends of the Jubilee Pool’s website for more information and the latest news on the pool.