Putney Leisure Centre’s 33-metre pool is being permanently cut in two. Nobody was consulted, and when swimmers found out on Tuesday, public pressure caused the council to halt the plan within hours.
Yesterday lunchtime Places Leisure, the company that manages the centre for Wandsworth Council, emailed members about the expected summer closure for refurbishment. The email also mentioned, for the first time, that the pool would be ‘reconfigured to provide both a dedicated 25m swimming pool and a separate teaching pool’. Nobody had been told this was coming.
Messages poured in to local councillors. Six hours after the email arrived, Cllr Ethan Brooks, the cabinet member for leisure who had just taken the role when the new Conservative-led council took charge in May, told Places Leisure the closure ‘must be paused’. The council was ‘not currently confident that adequate engagement has taken place’, he said. He apologised for communications ‘shared without Council oversight’ and promised a reset.
A decision taken first, explained later
Last year the same operator closed The Kitchen cafe at the centre without consulting anyone, and the previous administration later spent public money settling the dispute without saying how much. Each time, a decision about a building the public owns was taken first and explained afterwards, with users kept in the dark until it was effectively done.
Who decided to cut the pool, and when, is not on the public record. The 10-year Places Leisure contract was awarded in June 2025 under the previous Labour administration, and given the refusal to provide any information about the shift, it is very possible the decision to close the cafe and shrink the pool was written into it.
Putney.news has tried repeatedly to get the council to provide some transparency around its plans for Putney Leisure Centre: we have been met with a wall. The Conservative-led administration that paused the plan took charge only in May, after the election left no party in overall control.
The council now says that the operator’s email went out in the council’s name without its oversight. We have asked both Places Leisure and the council about the scope of the work, the fate of the diving boards and who authorised the original decision. Neither had responded at the time of publication.
A pool worth keeping
The pool opened in 1968, designed by Powell and Moya, and won a RIBA award the following year. Its L-shaped design, which folds a diving area into the main tank, is thought to be the first of its kind built in Britain. The building is locally listed.
A 33-metre pool is not a 25-metre pool with a bit to spare. Swimmers say it runs at the full length for early mornings, evenings and weekends, dropping to 25-metre lanes only for weekday lessons. Clubs and distance swimmers need the length, and Spencer Swim Team trains there. There is no other 33-metre pool within easy reach of SW15.
Dan Hawtrey, who has swum there for 16 years and has started the petition against the change, says the building is tired and badly needs the investment it has been promised, but not at the cost of the one thing that kept him coming back.
A standard length, and a rare one
Most public pools in Britain are 25 metres, the length the swimming world treats as standard for lessons, clubs and lane swimming, and the one the operator says it is moving Putney towards. A 50-metre Olympic pool was never an option: Britain built very few until the 2012 Games, and a building this size could not hold one.
Putney’s 33 metres is a survivor from an era when British pools were built to a jumble of imperial and metric figures, which is why so few others share it. Across the country, awkward older lengths like this have repeatedly been converted to 25 metres, or lost altogether when centres are rebuilt. About 500 public pools have closed across Britain since 2010, nearly half since the pandemic, according to Swim England and the GMB union.
The real question is not whether Putney needs investment, but whether a rare, award-winning pool should be standardised away to get it, or kept and restored. That is a question for the people who swim there. It is the one nobody asked.
What happens now
The pause is not a reprieve. The council says it ‘remains committed’ to ‘an ambitious refurbishment’, and the closure has been delayed, not dropped. Places Leisure has not said what would happen to the diving boards and the deep well beneath them, the part that gives the pool its L-shape, and has not set out the scope of the work. What the pool looks like when it reopens is still unresolved.
A petition, Save Putney’s 33-metre pool, asks the council to keep the full length and to consult before any permanent change. Residents can also press to take part in that promised engagement, and raise it with Cllr Brooks at cllr.e.brooks@wandsworth.gov.uk.
The work was due to start on 1 July. For now it will not. Whether the 33-metre pool survives the redesign that follows is the question the council has just promised to ask residents, having very nearly not asked them at all.
What do you think?
Hi, there is a teaching pool, a separate one in another room. I spend many Sundays in it with the kids…..has this gone ?
I love the 33m pool it really stretches you. If you want to swim 25m they offer this during the day across the diving pool. So why do they need to cut the long pool as well?
I suspect it all boils down to making profit out of lessons at the expense of members!
This building is listed and should be protected against the vandalism of greedy commercial operators. Next thing they’ll be destroying one of the few remaining diving complexes left in the UK
I strongly want to keep the 33m pool. It gives great flexibility for different groups of swimmers. As for the teaching pool, it is still there, but I reckon it is closed half the time. So there is still plenty of capacity to use the teaching pool more than it is being used.
The centre does need a refurbishment and upgrade without a doubt. However it is exceptional due to it’s size and shape – including the diving pool. The basic layout should be maintained.