Track 21 · Water · 1:11
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Stop twenty. Parliament Hill Lido.
Sixty metres of unheated open-air water, opened in nineteen thirty eight at the very end of the great age of London lido building, when the London County Council was putting these things up across the city on the theory that working people were entitled to swim outdoors in the sun.
Most of them are gone. This one survived, is listed, and was relined in stainless steel, which is why on a bright morning the whole pool looks like mercury and photographs better than anything else on this walk.
It is open every day of the year and it is not heated on any of them. In January the water sits around four degrees and there is still a queue at seven in the morning. There is a serious early-swimming culture here that has nothing to do with fitness and everything to do with the twenty minutes afterwards.
Charged, cheaper early, and towels are your own problem.
Back up onto the Heath and head north-east, downhill, to the bottom of the chain of ponds on the Hampstead side, near South End Green. Ten minutes. Walk up the path with the water on your left.
51.55644, -0.15131 · where this is on a map