Starting with some photos of Ramsgate Marina Swimming Pool
Closed in 1976 and people ask why?
Personally I think this is mostly a temperature related thing, and base this on having been in it, the main problem was the water was very cold.
Perhaps not an issue back in the 1930s when the pool first opened as I think heated public swimming pools started to appear in the UK just before WW2, but didn’t really become common until the 1960s.
You can heat outdoor swimming pools, I think those like the Ramsgate one that used constantly changing filtered seawater to keep the contents clean enough to swim in would be prohibitively expensive to heat.
Of course there are plenty of people who would pay to swim in an unheated seawater swimming pool next to the sea, we used to when we were children, but I think the main reason for the closure was that there just weren’t enough of them by 1976 when the repair bill was fairly large and it closed for good.
I think another aspect was the closure of the high diving board, which was one of the pool’s main attractions, so there is a safety elf element.
Then there are the rumours.
Some say it was a council blunder that damaged Ramsgate marina swimming pool so badly it could never be used again. The story goes that some bright council officer decided to take the running of it from the borough engineers and give it to the councils leisure department. The sceptical engineers handed it to the leisure department with a set of instructions about running and maintaining it, one of which was never to empty it without supporting the seaward facing side. This was because it was designed so the weight of the water inside counteracted the forces of the sea battering against it. The first thing the leisure department did when they took it over was to empty it unsupported. In the resulting cover up councillors were told that the damage was caused bomb during WW2 that had weakened the structure.
Some say the problem was the old design of the building and that the pool was actually on 'stilts' and you could walk underneath it at low tide. As the tide came in the void was filled with seawater. The dated building measures made this a fatal design fault. Gradually the chalk below began to erode, and as a result the foundations moved, causing the pool to crack. This was patched for years until repairs were impossible. It was also too expensive to replace.
Some say that the chalk at sea edge was excavated deliberately and that the council failed to stop this.
A good article on the Lost Lidos site at http://www.lostlidos.co.uk/2015/05/16/ramsgate-marina-pool/
Next Margate Lido
We went to Margate yesterday, mostly Old Bank Bookshop and Ghost Papa, mostly buying books for Michaels Bookshop here in Ramsgate.
Here is link to the new secondhand books we put out today
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Comments, since I started writing this blog in 2007 the way the internet works has changed a lot, comments and dialogue here were once viable in an open and anonymous sense. Now if you comment here I will only allow the comment if it seems to make sense and be related to what the post is about. I link the majority of my posts to the main local Facebook groups and to my Facebook account, “Michael Child” I guess the main Ramsgate Facebook group is We Love Ramsgate. For the most part the comments and dialogue related to the posts here goes on there. As for the rest of it, well this blog handles images better than Facebook, which is why I don’t post directly to my Facebook account, although if I take a lot of photos I am so lazy that I paste them directly from my camera card to my bookshop website and put a link on this blog.