Fantastic newly built Olympic size pool only 30 minutes from home!
I’ve had this pool in mind for a while. It’s approx. 30 minutes from home and the ideal pool for a Saturday morning swim.
This is an impressive sports ‘village’, less than a year old (opened May 2022); the facility combines a complete Olympic spec pool (50m by 25m), a water park, and just about every other indoor and outdoor sport! All are open and fully accessible to the local Derby community.
Arrived around 8:30am, and the car park was full (always a concern!). Have to sign up for an ‘Everyone Active’ card and pay the very reasonable £5.50 PAYG entrance fee. Adding this pool in its full 50m format would have been great, but walking out onto the pool deck with the two booms and three separate pools in one single basin is impressive.
Have to walk the entire route to the far end, past all the parents sitting in the poolside seating! Find a free, fast lane from the 10-lane setup and jump in. Two immediate observations, the pool is the perfect ‘cool’ swim temperature, and the water is crystal clear thanks to the floor-to-ceiling windows flooding light onto the pool deck. This end of the pool is set at approx. 1.8m, the perfect swim depth; the other half of the pool utilises a movable floor to make the depth more suitable for swim lessons etc.
My only gripe… Lane ropes, not proper wave breakers. There are four lanes to the far side with lane wave breakers, but the six public swim lanes are separated with thin float ropes. With such a flexible pool format, storage and constant change of lane ropes must be a pain, I’m in the far lane, so I have at least one wave breaker!
Complete a quite enjoyable 3,600m swim.
I didn’t get to see the water park area, but there is a great view of the two entwined water slides from the stairwell down to the pool deck.
When they finally do redevelop my local Wyndley Sports Centre, I really hope this is the format they use for pool design. With the two movable booms, the flexibility of three distinct pool layouts, e.g. a 25m pool for public lane swim, 25m cross-width lanes for swim lessons and a third pool for a family swim, really does make this a pool for everyone. The availability of lane swim sessions throughout the day is most notable and welcomed - something that has become a real challenge post-COVID as schedules have failed to return to normal.
Swim Stats
- 3600 meters total swim
- 1:29 pace / 100m
- Garmin Swim 2 Watch
Review
(98/100)
Impressive building, fantastic pool and seemingly everything you would hope a brand new public sports centre would be! The pool is a proper Olympic 50m x 10 lane pool with two booms which form up to three separate 25-metre pools.
Pool Details
- Length 50m (Setup with 25m lanes) meters
- 10-lane pool
- Indoor
Moorways Sports Village
Moor Lane, Allenton, Derby DE24 9HY, UK
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