Swansea's Saltwater Swimming Pool 🏊‍♀️

Good morning, Swansea!

In the late 19th century, a group of Swansea businessmen had an ambitious plan - to build a grand indoor swimming baths and public laundry right on the edge of the bay, at a time when most people still washed clothes by hand and braved swimming in the chilly waters of Swansea Bay.

Except, not everything went to plan…

This week, grab a cuppa and dive into the story of Swansea’s Victorian baths - featuring muddy seawater, financial trouble, and wartime destruction.

Catch you on Sunday!

Andrew

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By the early 1880s, public baths were becoming a familiar sight in Britain. After the Public Baths and Wash-houses Act of 1846, towns and cities increasingly built swimming baths and public laundries to improve hygiene and public health, particularly for working-class households who had no washing facilities at home.

In Swansea, a group of local businessmen set up the Swansea Baths and Laundry Company - believing they could build something ambitious, modern, and profitable without relying on public funds.

For Swansea residents, this meant no longer timing a swim around the tides, changing in the open air, or braving cold winds on the sands. For the first time, sea bathing could be done indoors and in relative comfort.

The site they chose was prominent and strategic - at the bottom of St Helen’s Road, right on the edge of Swansea Bay. When the complex opened in July 1884, it was presented as one of the most advanced facilities of its kind in Wales. According to reports at the time, over £14,000 (£2.3 million in today’s money) had been spent on construction.

The baths included two large salt-water swimming pools, each around 70 feet long and 25 feet wide, divided into first- and second-class baths with separate entrances and changing accommodation. Alongside the swimming baths were Turkish baths, vapour rooms, plunge baths and cold baths, arranged so that bathers could move through them in sequence.

The Turkish baths were promoted as a full experience rather than a single room - a sequence of hot, warm and cooling spaces, with shampooing and dressing rooms, designed to mirror the fashionable Turkish baths found in larger English cities.

Running alongside the bathing facilities was the steam-powered public laundry, equipped with mechanised washing, drying and ironing machinery intended to serve both private households and commercial customers. From the outset, it was clear that the laundry was expected to help pay for the Baths themselves.

At a time when most homes had no hot running water and laundry meant boiling clothes at home or washing outdoors, the idea of a steam-powered public laundry was genuinely transformative.

At the opening, the local press struck a confident tone. The complex was described as an establishment “such as no other town in Wales possessed.”

For a brief moment, it looked like the gamble might pay off.

The Swansea Baths were not filled with fresh water - and that was a problem. Both pools were filled with salt water pumped directly from Swansea Bay, drawn in through intake pipes laid several hundred yards offshore. This allowed the pools to be filled mechanically rather than relying on tides or manual labour, and meant bathers could swim in seawater without stepping onto the sands. Fresh water was supplied separately, mainly for rinsing and for use in the laundry.

Bath-and-laundry complexes elsewhere in Britain relied on this balance, but in Swansea the seawater drawn in from the bay proved far muddier than expected. As a tidal bay fed by rivers and bordered by industrial docks, the water often carried silt and sediment when pumped into the pools.

The system itself was not unusual (having been used at similar facilities in other coastal towns), but the local conditions in Swansea proved harder to control than the plans had assumed.

Very quickly, the company was forced to act. Additional infrastructure had to be built after the baths had already opened, including settling arrangements designed to allow mud to drop out of the water before it entered the pools. This added to costs, and swimming in muddy water, unsurprisingly, undermined confidence in a facility that was meant to represent cleanliness, health and modernity.

Decline and Rebirth

These problems did not bring the entire operation to an immediate halt, but they did shift its balance. Over time, the bathing side of the business faded, while the laundry continued as a more reliable and practical service. Variations of the company carried on operating from St Helen’s Road into the 20th century, increasingly as a laundry rather than a place to swim.

Sadly, the original Victorian buildings did not survive the 20th century intact. During the Swansea Blitz of 1940–43, the extensive Baths and Laundry complex on St Helen’s Road was badly damaged, and in the years that followed it was demolished. In its place, Swansea Council later built a new, purpose-built swimming baths - St Helen’s Baths -, completed in the 1960s.

St Helen’s Baths survived until the late 1990s, when building of the new National Pool on Sketty Lane forced its closer, to be replaced with the apartment complex that stands on the site today. The video above gives a lovely glimpse into the last days of St Helen’s Baths, complete with interviews and memories from its staff and swimmers.

Catch you on Sunday!

Andrew.

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