About Us

In 2004Lewisham Council announced plans to demolish Ladywell Leisure Centre in 2007 - we saved it! The pool will stay open until the forecast replacement is ready.  Sadly the plan is awfully inadequate and instead of being a plan for a community sport and leisure centre it is a plan for a lifestyle pool for the new residential developments to be built in front of Lewisham Station.

The following pages are maintained by the SAVE LADYWELL POOL CAMPAIGN who can be contacted on ladywellpool@hotmail.com

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 Mo, Sep 19, 2005

Council unable to show advice for closure of Sauna

At last Wednesday's Full Council Meeting another question about the Ladywell Leisure Centre was put forward by Lewisham Central Ward's Cllr Andrew Milton.

The topic of the enquiry was this time the closure of the Sauna and Turkish Bath.

Those were a much loved feature of the Ladywell Leisure Centre. Some time before the recent closure of the Ladywell Leisure Centre those feature were closed and never re-opened.

Some months ago we started enquiring about that and were told that it had been for financial reasons.

Then Cllr Milton, using the Freedom of Information Act (FOI) asked to see documentation about the advice to close the sauna and the Council couldn't find a written document to support this theory.

Now asked again by Cllr Milton about the complete lack of documents the council gave a written answer not related to the question asked.

Cllr Milton therefore declared himself unsatisfied by the answer and repeated the question as a supplementary.

What the Cabinet member for Culture (responsible for Sport) answered this time is that they wanted only to re-open the swimming provision so not to leave Lewisham without a pool for 6 years but didn't want to commit to any other investment as the centre was anyway supposed to close in 2010.

In her view this is sufficient reason to justify the fact that there isn't a record of the decision.

We think that it is unacceptable that either the mayor or the officers of whoever is taking decisions in Lewisham decides to close a community feature using a casual discretionary style incompatible with any principle of accountability.

We honestly feel sorry for the Cabinet member for Culture Cllr McGarrigle.
We're sure that she understands that what she says doesn't make any sense.

Some months ago we contacted a highly reputable company and discovered that a sauna for a leisure centre (up to 10 people) including installation cost £4,500.
Because at last count in 1994, the LLC had over 400,000 entries per year, supposing that only 1% of attendants have a sauna, at a cost of just above £1 each the sauna would have paid itself in the first year starting to generate an income with the second.
...read more...
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Meeting's minute online


The full minute of last week's meeting is now available at this page. ...read more...
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