Tu, May 22, 2007Survey of diving boards
WE are trying to find out how many diving facilities have been lost in the last 25 years.......
If you can think of any London area pools that had diving boards but either now don't have them or are shut altogether could you let us know? We think that London has gone from nearly 50 in the late 70's to 7 now (not all with the diving facilities open to the public)
As on average diving boards can increase the number of young people using the pool for public swim by about 200% this is quite an issue!!
via London Pools Campaign ...read more...Diving pool specs
...public access to diving facilities in the London area has declined by approximately 90%. The stock of diving facilities has declined from over 45 pools with diving facilities to under 10, and many of the pools that have retained the diving facilities now have much more limited public access... ..In pools where diving boards are retained, and are available to the public for reasonable use, there is a greater number of children using the pool. While no research has been carried out to prove this, some individual cases will indicate the truth of this statement.
In Wales, the closure of the diving facilities at the Aberdare Pool has led to a 60% fall in revenue, and a change in the user profile. The people who have stopped going to the pool are the younger users, the children and youths, the very people that everyone is trying to get into pools. Its not that the pool is closed, the swimming area remains, it is the diving area and the water flumes that are not available. In Deptford, a disability swimming group is finding that teenagers are dropping out as the leisure pool that they use is ‘boring’, there is nothing interesting to do. Some of the children that have dropped out are interested in diving, but there are no public facilities now available locally. If there were they would use them. At present however they don’t do anything...
The above paragraph comes for the web-page of the Great Britain Diving Federation.
We all know that in London diving has become a sport at risk of extinction and whilst for some unexplicable reason Ladywell doesn't have its diving boards anymore one would have reasonably hoped that Lewisham Council would have taken the opportunity to re-introduce diving in the Borough with the new pool planned at Loampit Vale.
It was Mayor Bullock that 3 years ago, announcing the project for a new pool to replace Ladywell had written to all of us:
"we will look at incorporating a competition diving feature alongside the pools"
Instead look they did not. As the shameful Leisure Needs Analysis of Lewisham Council advised them:
"Provision of specialist deep water for diving is not considered to be a need"
It was a professional consultant to say that. You cannot possibly know better than them!
...read more...