Nine of Britain’s best Arts-and-Crafts swimming ponds
Country Life - GEORGE TOWNSEND
“Before the vogue for bright blue, chlorine-treated swimming pools, members of Victorian and Edwardian society built naturalistic bathing ponds inspired by the Arts & Crafts movement” - cultural historian George Townsend looks at early swimming pools in Britain including the pool at Great Ambrook which Garden Museum director Christopher Woodward believes to be the oldest ornamental swimming pool in England.
The Swimming Pool at Great Ambrook
The swimming pond has become a contemporary garden design staple and though styles differ, the principle is consistent: mini-ecosystems of plants and micro-organisms in shallower ‘regeneration zones’ to purify a deeper pool. With no chemicals required, swimming ponds are relatively low-maintenance and eco-friendly, not to mention aesthetically pleasing.
Swimming ponds mark a turn away from the turquoise, chlorine-treated pools that remained fashionable for decades from the 1930s onwards. They also echo the spring-fed plunge pools of 18th-century estates such as Painswick in Gloucestershire - linked, in their day, with a wide array of health benefits.
As a cultural historian who studies freshwater bathing, I’ve been piecing together another, overlooked chapter in this story that chimes with present-day ideals: the Arts-and-Crafts inspired naturalistic bathing areas, especially popular between the Victorian era and 1920s, that blurred the line between ornament and recreation.
As I have sifted through archives, memoirs and newspapers, sharing notes with architects and garden historians, a fresh picture has emerged of the home-bathing habits of Victorian and Edwardian people. They desired, to borrow William Morris’s evocative phrase, to ‘wash the night off’ in garden pools that trod a thin, thin line between formal design and embracing nature.
Arthur Smith Graham’s Italian garden at Great Ambrook, Devon, features a walled garden where, in one corner, a colonnaded pool looks out over the surrounding fields. Garden Museum director Christopher Woodward describes the pool as small, but deep, and ‘definitely celebrating the act of swimming in its design.’