Wyndley Leisure Centre. Have Goggles, Will Travel Pool #6

My home pool!

Finally back home and ready to record a swim at my local pool.

This one won’t be a post about the actual swim on the day, I’ve swum here hundreds (maybe thousands) of times, and they all blur into one!

This is my local ‘default’ pool; when I’m home and in full-swing swimming, I can do 720+ lengths / 18km a week here, usually mid-afternoon late lunch swims when I often have all six lanes to myself!

I have a love-hate relationship with Wyndley! This was the pool in which I learned to swim; I think I can just about remember sitting on the benches waiting for my very first swimming lesson in the kid’s pool, aged about four. I remember Saturday afternoon ‘raft’ sessions and Sunday morning trips with my brother Jamie and Dad to get us out of the house whilst Mum cooked Sunday lunch - always walking on the lethal ankle-twisting pebbles sunk in concrete along the path from the car park.

I can remember holding on to the steps when my junior swim teacher suggested to mum I should join a swim club. I remember countless club and school swimming galas here - but this is also the pool where I swam my last club training session and left the sport of swimming for almost twenty years!

The pool was originally 33.3m long with an L-shaped diving pit. I believe the extended length was part of the success of our swim club when competing in 25m pools, we trained here Thursday nights, and you could feel the difference on a Friday morning.

The facilities are now old and in desperate need of replacement. After local council debate about its future (I believe there was a plan to replace it with a 50m full-Olympic pool and the 2012 Chinese swim team being based here), the pool closed in 2008 for a quick ‘refurbishment’ with the roof in desperate need of replacement (finding a piece of roof tile floating in the pool was not unusual). Unfortunately, this became a multi-year closure with a budget bloating to more than £3m! The council claimed at the time this would extend its lifespan for another 10-15 years (must remember to question this in 2024!).

When the pool finally reopened in 2009, it was hard to see where the money had been spent! The changing rooms had new cubicles (although someone mentioned they’d been purchased secondhand!). A floating boom split the pool with 25m (24.6m!) lanes into the diving pit, but otherwise, it was still the same broken tiles and ragged appearance; it was very disappointing to think what it could have been, somehow, even the ankle twisting pebbles escaped the health and safety brigade.

I love this pool, and I have great memories here - but it is definitely time to knock it down and build the facilities the people of Sutton Coldfield deserve!