The Olympics comes to London Fields
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Two weeks ago I found myself at a loose end. Nico was away in sweden. I had no mini projects that needed finishing, or could be finished with the materials I had available and to top it all we had an hour extra to our day. I remembered seeing people cycling up to the new swimming pool that had opened in our local park, london fields, and thought I would bite the optomistic pie, suit up, and head on down.
I was rather surprised to see a queue of people coming out the automatic, anti-queue doors. As the mother of the family in front of me exclaimed, “its all the crazy hackney people wanting a pool so much that as soon as one opens, they race to queue up for a swim.”
Surprisingly enough this queue of people were absorbed by the olympic size of the pool itself, and there was room for everyone to swim around merrily. It was a very social occasion, with many london fields residents debating about whether or not this was the largest outdoor pool in europe. It is, definitely, the largest outdoor pool in London. As my parents found out, we hackney residents were lucky enough to receive this £3 million swim parlour, as it will house not just our eastend torsos, but also the australia and south african teams in training for the olympics.
And what lucky bunnies we are. Just this sunday I went again, and the weather being colder this time made the heated water evaporate into a low cloud above my head. It is one of the best public pools i’ve swum in and the meeting of nature and human bodies brought back many nostaligic-glorified memories of geography and biology classes.
