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.
Great Ambrook
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.’
Standen
The National Trust gardens at Standen, West Sussex, include an 1890s pool by Art-and-Crafts architect Philip Webb. Webb grew up in Oxford, where he swam with William Morris at Parson’s Pleasure. Morris's Iceland travels may have influenced the Standen pool’s roughly-hewn style.
Rayne Thatch
Located on the outskirts of Bristol, opposite his more imposing dwelling, was tobacco magnate Walter Melville Wills’s rustic ‘playhouse’ Rayne Thatch. It included, like Aldenham, a swimming pool by James Pulham and Son. Rayne Thatch is still a private residence.
Millthorpe Brooke
Humblest in this list is utopian polymath Edward Carpenter’s garden pool at Millthorpe, in Derbyshire. Next to a stream ‘full of music and grace,’ Carpenter erected a hut that served as both a study and ‘bathing shelter’. Here, he swam and penned several works over the course of four decades, whatever the weather.
Hidcote Manor
Lawrence Johnston, owner and architect of Hidcote Manor, Gloucestershire, designed Hidcote’s pool before the First World War. Back then, gardeners regularly drained and cleaned it, and dyed the water blue. An army major’s daughters often visited from nearby Kiftsgate Court, accompanied by a chaperone, taking summer morning dips in the pool.
Valewood Farm
As at Hidcote, Oliver Hill dyed his stylish elliptical pool at Valewood Farm, Sussex, azure blue — pre-empting what was to come. ‘This azure theme was carried through the garden,’ notes writer and former Country Life Gardens Editor Kathryn Bradley-Hole, ‘with blue-glazed Spanish pots of varied shapes placed carefully around the pool, at doorways and within the loggias.’
Aldenham House
The swimming pool at Aldenham House in Hertfordshire was converted from a fish pond and featured rock works by James Pulham and Son, constructed out of Pulham’s signature ‘Pulhamite’ artificial stone. The grotto was repurposed as an air raid shelter during the Second World War.
Stoneywell Cottage
Leading Arts-and-Crafts garden designer and former Country Life gardens Editor Gertrude Jekyll admired the rough simplicity of Ernest Gimson’s bathing pool at Stoneywell Cottage, Leicestershire.
Once upon a time, the house had no bathroom and so the pool was a summer alternative to winter’s indoor jug and basin. Stoneywell is open to the public through the National Trust.
Lindridge House
The 1920s ‘swimming bath’ at Lindridge House, Devon, replaced a pond, boathouse and footbridge, and was a sign of things to come. The fact that it was so long (50 metres) and the diving board reflected a growing passion for swimming as an athletic pursuit. Historian and Country Life writer Christopher Hussey called its design ‘admirably clean’.
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