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IT must be a sign of our Anglo-Saxon awkwardness about the pleasures of the flesh that we borrowed the word lido from the Italians, just as we took cafe, restaurant and Champagne from the French. Like restaurants, lidos are about style and sensuality. Iris Murdoch called swimming pools "machines for swimming in", but lidos are grander. Lidos are to swimming pools as lingerie is to underwear. Their outrageous fountains and curvaceous terraces celebrate the exuberant beauty of the water they frame, so that a special sense of freedom comes over you when you stand poised to plunge in. Lidos have always been designed with a strong sense of theatre, noble settings for the display of bathers or the daring of swallow-divers on high boards. You go to a lido to bathe and to be seen to bathe. Like anything with such a high ingredient of style, lidos have inevitably swung wildly in and out of fashion. During the 1930s, every self-respecting town in the country lusted for one. Then, during the 1960s and 1970s, in a nationwide act of vandalism to rival Cromwell's desecration of the churches, lidos were closed one after another, filled in and turned into car parks, supermarkets or garden centres. Recently, realising what we had is all but gone, we have been rediscovering the practical value of lidos as symbols of the central importance of good health, fitness and pleasure in our lives. Miraculously, one or two have survived. The magnificent tidal Jubilee Bathing Pool at Penzance transformed the modest resort overnight into the capital of the Cornish Riviera on its grand opening in May 1935, when the mayor led a procession from the Sailors' Institute and Professor Hicks, the Cornish veteran champion, took the first plunge before a cheering crowd. This was followed by a beauty parade of bathing belles and a water-polo match against Plymouth, won, naturally, by the Penzance lads. Everything about the Jubilee Pool is grand to this day, thanks to some recent repairs and improvements. The gigantic triangular lido juts boldly out from the seafront as if to emphasise its pre-eminent position as the southernmost pool in the British Isles. It opened in the same year as Plymouth's imposing seafront lido, the Tinside Pool, which now lies scandalously neglected and derelict along the coast. In 1990, Penzance nearly lost its lido, too, when the council proposed to turn it into a modern "fun pool" in an indoor "leisure centre". It was saved by the imagination of John Clarke, the retired assistant county architect for Cornwall. He had the Jubilee Pool listed as a Grade II building, then raised money for its repair. With its dramatic ocean-liner decks, stainless-steel fittings and terraces, the Jubilee Pool is highly theatrical. Winding your way down towards the million gallons of seawater that flood this artificial rock pool, you feel you are going on stage. The effect is heightened by the brilliance of the reflected sunbeams flickering about the white solar-heated concrete ramparts that surround the pool and gaze out to sea. Such bright light makes every lido swimmer feel a little like a Hollywood star. It was the old London County Council that led the way in the lido boom of the 1920s and 1930s with its open-air pools in Victoria Park, Hackney, Brockwell Park and Tooting Bec. Only two lidos have survived in south London, at Brockwell Park and Tooting Bec. The rows of wooden cubicle doors reflected in the water at "the Bec" on Tooting Common are painted bright Rastafarian red, yellow and green, and run the full hundred yards of the biggest pool in London. If the sheer size of it has not taken your breath away, the water temperature probably will, until it warms up after the first hot spell of the summer. There can be as many as 6,000 here on a hot day. In less than 18 lengths of the Bec, you have covered a mile, so it is the favoured haunt of the Channel swimmers and triathletes, who come here for long-distance training. With more than 500 members, including the 200 women of the Bec Mermaids, the South London Swimming Club must be one of the most enterprising in the country. In 1991, when the pool was threatened with closure over the winter months, the swimmers' passion for the place convinced Wandsworth council to agree that they should take over the running of the lido off-season. The south Londoners are enthusiastic cold-water swimmers, even breaking the ice if necessary to swim a width, and always racing on New Year's Day and Christmas Day. Tooting Bec lido is at last being cherished as a public asset with National Lottery funding for reconstruction that includes a 1930s-style poolside cafe. To the north of the river, there are still the superb Highgate ponds on Hampstead Heath. The Ladies' Pond is highest up the hill and is said to have the best water because it is nearest to the natural springs in Kenwood that feed the deep, wooded pools. There has been swimming at the Men's Pond for more than 90 years. Entrance is free and in the fenced enclosure nudity is de rigueur among the regulars - the serious swimmers, chess players, weight-lifters, readers and sunbathers for whom this is a sort of club. Out on the springboards and in the water, costumes are required. There are no longer any high boards - a sign of these cautious times. In the 1930s, the Highgate Diving Club used to practise on the 10-metre board and their Aquatic Carnivals attracted crowds of 10,000. The Mixed Pool is next down the hill and especially beautiful on summer evenings. The City of London Corporation still maintains the Highgate Ponds for swimmers free of charge, also allowing free swimming in the listed 1930s Parliament Hill Fields lido from seven until nine each morning. The 67-yard pool is at its best at that time of day, surrounded by a walled amphitheatre of paved terraces and surveyed by a bay-windowed cafe. Bathers are always accompanied by a pair of resident ducks - real, not plastic. Just a bike ride away is my favourite miniature lido, in the middle of Covent Garden on the corner of Endell Street. The Oasis lives up to its name as a haven where Londoners can abandon themselves to the embrace of sunshine or the water. I recommend a winter visit, when the heated open-air pool steams vigorously during frosty spells and fellow swimmers loom up out of a dense mist. You can still bathe during summer in the Serpentine lido in Hyde Park, even though it recently failed to reach the EU's mandatory standards of bathing-water quality - at least one hardy devotee, the writer Vikram Seth, has said he will not be put off. It was George Lansbury, the leader of the Labour Party, who opened part of the lake for mixed bathing in 1929 in the face of stiff opposition from the parks commissioners. He subscribed to the new social ideas about healthy urban living, the benefits of sunshine and sunbathing, and the new cult of the outdoor life, many of which had originated in Germany. In 1920, the mayor of Berlin, Gustav Boss, had created people's parks, Volksparks, where free outdoor swimming pools were not only part of the park but very much its symbolic heart. The new cult of the body in Germany found expression in Hans Suren's Man and Sunlight, published in 1925. It went into multiple editions all over Europe. Over the next decade, the lido turnstiles never stopped clicking. By 1935, when the Penzance lido opened, so did others at Ilkley, Norwich, Peterborough, Aylesbury, Cheltenham and Saltdean. By some miracle, R W H Jones's marvellously streamlined, flowing Saltdean lido near Brighton has recently undergone a renaissance. It is open again after a period of neglect that looked as if it might prove terminal. To swim there is the nearest thing I can imagine to being a penguin in that other definitive lido of the 1930s, Berthold Lubetkin's Penguin Pool at London Zoo. At Saltdean, the beauty of the swimming pool is in its graphic simplicity, framing the contrasting, exquisite complexity of the snaking mosaic of wave forms projected on the bottom. Jones's design expresses the natural parabolas and curves water makes in bright chrome railings or horizontal, curvilinear sweeps of whitened concrete. Architects were quick to recognise the potential of the lido as a richly symbolic threshold space between the elements of earth and water. Lubetkin's Penguin Pool, built in 1934, was not only the first piece of modern architecture in Britain to hit the headlines and capture the popular imagination; it is still probably the most exciting lido anyone has ever built. More than that, it is a bold experiment in community housing for a little society of birds that look and behave very much like people. Its twin cantilevered spiral ramps rising out of the water, on which the penguins sun themselves in their dinner suits, caused a sensation in the architectural world. Engineered by Lubetkin's partner Ove Arup, they dramatically demonstrated the potential of reinforced concrete as a new and poetic way of building that could flow and spiral like water. The clean lines and abstract simplicity of the construction afforded a glimpse of the possibilities of life for people, as well as penguins, in a new modern environment and inspired a generation of new lidos all over Europe. I last visited the lido at Ilkley in Yorkshire during a heat wave and its curious flower-shaped pool was packed with so many swimmers they threatened to displace the water. Children sat astride the vigorous central fountain in vain attempts to suppress it, squealing on the knife-edge between pleasure and pain. Families sat picnicking or sunbathing on acres of lawn divided by hedges, or in mock half-timbered pavilions with open fronts. They even had wire baskets in the changing rooms, but no Brylcreem dispenser. The formality of Cheltenham's Sandford lido, with its white-colonnaded classical pool, fountain and gardens, contrasts with the homely simplicity of the charming miniature heated open-air lido over at Cirencester, which dates back to 1870 and has been heated since 1931. It was successfully taken over as a community enterprise when the passionate local swimmers refused to see it closed down by the council nearly 30 years ago. You enter by a little footbridge across the river by a castle wall and there are lawns, a view of grazing cattle and a bright Mediterranean-blue tuck shop serving Bovril and hot chocolate. Some of the best lidos are half-wild and run by swimmers themselves. At Henleaze, behind villas in the leafy outskirts of Bristol, is the magnificent Henleaze Swimming Club, a flooded quarry fed by springs that has been the club lido since the 1920s. There are high diving boards, lawns and willows, and changing pavilions, and the steep, hewn cliffsides create a natural suntrap. It is a spectacular setting for a swim, but there is a long waiting list to be one of the 1,500 members. On the banks of the River Frome at Farleigh Hungerford, near Trowbridge in Somerset, is an even wilder unofficial lido. Near the old castle at Farleigh, there are changing sheds in a south-facing water meadow and ladders lead into a deep river pool. In Cambridge, beside the Cam at Jesus Green, the lido seems to run to infinity, bordered by a row of tall limes you can gaze into as you swim. Meanwhile, in Lewes, the beautiful, spring-fed Pells Swimming Pool - which opened in 1860 and is the oldest in the country - is in peril of becoming a skateboard park despite a petition from 3,200 townspeople collected in just three days recently. In Iris Murdoch's novel The Philosopher's Pupil, life in an English spa town centres on the pools and baths, and the townspeople all swim seven days a week, morning, noon and night, introducing their children to the infants' pool at the age of six weeks. "Serious swimming," says the narrator, "was a matter of pride in our town." The motto over the pool entrance, Natando Virtus, suggests that through swimming comes virtue, personal and perhaps civic, too. The lido movement of the 1930s likewise placed pleasure and health firmly at the centre of civic life, freely available to all. The significance of the recent decline of many of our lidos, as the writer and social policy analyst Ken Worpole has pointed out, is that "their neglect speaks volumes about our return to the private, the indoor and our retreat from collective provision". If we want a healthier, happier society, we might, instead of always thinking of lidos as things of the past, begin to imagine the lidos of the future.
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