Queen Mother Sports Centre

Heading over to World Travel Market at London Excel today, might even catch Richard E. Grant's closing keynote. First, a wander through Westminster to Queen Mother Sports Centre.

The pool opened in 1981 and is right in the heart of residential Westminster.

I arrive to construction in the entrance, so I check in at a temporary fold-away table doubling as the reception desk. I pay the rather steep £9.05 (central London, north of the river pricing), then head upstairs across a walkway that looks down over the corner of the pool, before dropping back downstairs to the changing rooms. Going up just to come down feels odd; maybe it's a temporary route while they're doing works.

It's a 25 m pool with six lanes, plus a separate, sort of diving pit with a waterslide pool at the far end. Looking down into the hall on my way to the changing rooms, I can see it's busy: swim lessons in two lanes and several swimmers in the other four.

The pool hall feels like a subterranean basement box. It definitely reads 80s and has a slightly claustrophobic vibe. It's not a small hall, but the wide, low windows that line the pool sit right up at ceiling level.

I plan a regular 3.2 km swim and get on with it. The cleanliness isn't great; it shows its 44 years of wear and tear, in the pool and around the deck. The changing rooms aren't much better. The shallow end is very shallow (scrape your hand along the bottom shallow), and flip turns need a bit of an angle. I'm trying to remember the depth sign: 1.1 m sticks in my mind, but I'd have believed it if it said 0.8 m.

Swim done, I walk 20 minutes back to the Curio Hilton Westminster for a quick shower, then train east to the Docklands.