Lido in the woods

It's been a while since I blogged about a Lido, the previous post being back in 2018 and local to me. It was rather generic, as far as pools go. This one is completely different. It's a bit further afield, but somewhat unique, with pillars and statues and a bit of an ancient Grecian or Roman vibe, but surrounded by woodland. As soon as I saw images online, I knew I would have to see it in person. I like quirkiness. I probably wouldn't travel this far for an abandoned cottage, but anything unique and unconventional is sure to get my attention. It's not every day one finds something like this in the middle of the woods.

But what's the story of this place? Well, it's difficult to pinpoint when the pool was actually constructed, but it exists on the grounds of an old mansion, so presumably it was once the private pool of one of the former occupants. It eventually did open to the public, but the remains of pillars and statues hint at the former refinery.

Many of the pillars and statues have been destroyed, but some are still lying around, with moss growing on them.

The eagles still stand, one on each pillar in the corner of the pools deep end, facing each other to give it all a bit of symmetry.

 

So, we can look at a few of the mansions former occupants and perhaps guess which one of them wanted to swim in an awesome pool in his downtime. I think the mansion itself is now apartments or a private dwelling. Either way, it's occupied and not connected to the pool anymore, so I won't be venturing up to it. 

 

Prior to the current mansion, there was another, which was built for a rich chap called Joseph to retire in. Joseph was a bit of a local legend. He was born in 1665 to a very poor family, but he used to carry around a basket of stuff that he would sell. I'm not even sure what kind of stuff. Could have been jewelry. Could have been a cursed monkey paw. Records are vague. But he used the money to buy a donkey, and then when he was 21 he set off for London to sell yarn. He ended up doing so well that other cotton merchants had him dragged in front of a parliamentary committee, complaining that he was monopolising the import of cotton. That never went anywhere though, and he just went from strength to strength.

The cool thing about Joseph isn't that he made himself rich from rock bottom, but that his experience at rock bottom made him a good rich person. Unlike today's rich people who just diddle kids, Joseph actually adopted them and paid for their education, and even had a school built. His own biological children, twelve in total, never survived to adulthood, so perhaps he also had a void he wanted to fill. But his generosity was quite well known, and there was a monument made for him after he died in 1786. 

The monument ended up removed, but his nephew Jack would eventually hunt it down and restore it in the local church, where it sits to this day.

 

Funnily enough, Joseph was called upon to help restore a big stone cross after it was vandalised. Some local kids had broke off a chunk of it, and attempted to take it to the top of a hill. They managed to get pretty far for kids carrying a half metric ton of holy stone uphill in the dead of night, but ultimately they decided to ditch it in a field. I'm not sure why Joseph was called upon to restore it, but he refused, and the chunk of rock still sits there, where it is passed by dog walkers every single day. Ironically it outlived the monument it was stolen from.

 

I love these stone stairs down into the pool, purely because of how ancient they look.

 

Also on the side of the pool are numeric indicators that tell how deep the pool is, presumably in feet. 

 

When Joseph died, his mansion... well, his nephew Jack got it, but Jack was born in 1790, or 1791 depending on varying sources. That's some time after Joseph died, which means that even though he's mentioned as the next in line, he can't possibly have been. Unless Joseph was clairvoyant, he wouldn't leave his mansion to a child who hadn't even been conceived.  

Maybe he was clairvoyant. Who knows?

Jack did a lot of horse racing, and once sailed a load of emigrants to New Zealand. But most relevantly he had the mansion rebuilt in 1811, creating the fourteen-bedroom bonanza that exists today. It's entirely possible that he had the pool built when he had the house rebuilt. It's the perfect opportunity for it, after all.

My favourite thing about Jack was his petty streak. He purchased a pub, had it converted into a vicarage, and let every succession of local vicar live there rent free, until in 1865 when the village appointed a vicar that he didn't like, at which point he had the building turned back into a pub.

That's the sort of pettiness I admire. Fuck the vicar, give people a place to drink.

 

Towards the other end of the pool is the shallow end, and thanks to the internet I've managed to find vintage shots that show this angle, roughly, from the 1960s.

(Picture not mine, obviously)

As you can see, there were once more pillars and on top of them all were little statues. Now barely any of these remain. Perhaps they were stolen or smashed. Perhaps they're in the pool.

Of the pillar statues, one remains.

 

She's not in the best of shape, having lost her head and her hands. But of all the figures perched on the pillars, she's the only survivor.

 

I'm not sure what happened to Jack, but in 1869 the mansion was purchased by the local mayor, Francis, who had become filthy rich by buying a mill with some inheritance money. 

 

It's entirely possible that Mayor Francis is the one who had the pool built. In the UK, recreational swimming really took off in 1875, when people like Matthew Webb swam across the English Channel. It would only become increasingly more and more popular as the years progressed, but the mayors occupancy does coincide with the era when it was started to take off.

He passed away in 1884, ending the mansions era of private ownership. 

 

While it is commonly said that the pool was then used by a private country club, I can't find much solid info on that. But in 1901 it was obtained by the Co-Operative Holiday Association, an organisation established in 1893 to provide free or affordable holidays to poor or handicapped people. 

This was the brainchild of Thomas Arthur Leonard, who pioneered "rational holidays" to combat  commercial exploitation. He sounds like a great guy. As someone who does enjoy traveling, I've learned that it can be done for a lot cheaper than we're led to believe. Thomas Arthur Leonard was also instrumental in setting up the Youth Hostel Association in 1931, who owned that big castle-mansion that I recently blogged about. If it wasn't for Thomas Arthur Leonard, George Orwell may have had a happier time and wouldn't have had to sell his scarf. 

Thomas Arthur Leonard was also a big fan of Germany, before all that stuff with the Nazis kicked off. He was big on setting up places in Germany for people to stay on holiday. But likewise, he turned this mansion and the pool into accommodation for German holiday goers. There's a picture that shows a load of them here, although no recognisable background features are in the image. 

(Picture not mine, obviously)

But it's safe to say that everyone photographed here has probably swam in this pool.

The Co-Operative Holiday Association allegedly had the mansion and the pool right up into the 1930s, which clashes a bit with claims that a country club had it in the 1920s. And then in 1938, the pool was officially opened to the public.

Across the pool is a statue standing next to a couple of pillars. But what's really interesting is the statue doesn't appear in the retro shots of the place. Someone has moved it there from elsewhere around the pool.

 

The pool became incredibly popular with young people throughout the 1940s, 1950s and 1960s. There are numerous photos and video footage that depict children playing in the crowded pool. Apparently there was a bus service that dropped children off right outside the main entrance, so they'd just swing by after school. Because it was actually fed by a mountain stream, it was incredibly cold in the summer months, which added to its popularity.

According to folks reminiscing about the place, access cost a shilling for children  and half a crown for adults. According to the internet, a shilling is the old-money equivalent of 5p, and a crown is the equivalent of about 25p. But that's not taking inflation into consideration. 5p could buy you a lot more several decades ago. Even back when I was homeless, 5p was a third of the cost of a Freddo bar, making it my go-to hobo snack. Those were the days.

But anyway, in 1947 there was apparently one hell of a storm, and a huge quantity of water cascaded down from the moors above, flooded a load of houses, and made a mess of the pool. In the morning the pool was full of soil and trees, and dead or dying fish. Turns out people don't like swimming with dead or dying fish. The pool was forced to shut down temporarily.

But it was such a local treasure that everyone from the surrounding area came together to rescue it. Some say it was never the same again though, although nobody has elaborated on that. The fact is, it was still open and popular in the 1960s, so it can't have been that bad.

I've found another old shot, that is almost the same angle as this one.

 

It looks so amazing. And there's a little seating area across the pool too that is no longer there. Notice how that statue I mentioned is also missing. 

 

I'm quite fond of these steps at the end of the pool. 

I'm also quite fond of this retro sign saying "Bathers only." No non-swimmers could come down the steps to the swimming area.

I'm not sure when or why the pool closed to the public, but the sad truth about lidos is they really peaked in the inter-war era of the 20th Century and then had a steady decline as tastes changed and attendance fell. In the end, outdoor swimming pools just weren't profitable. Many lidos became derelict, like this one. Many more were just demolished. It's a shame because I think they're worth preserving. In fact, I would love to see outdoor swimming make a comeback. Wild swimming is certainly getting popular, so an outdoor pool comeback could work.

This pool fell into the stuff of local legend, and as it became more and more overgrown, it only seemed to appear more magical, like some sort of forgotten lost kingdom. Apparently numerous photoshoots and music videos have been had here, but I haven't found any of them. In the 1990s, someone did try to buy it and convert the changing area into a place to live. They apparently started clearing out much of the jungle that had taken over the pool area, but then the council refused their planning permission, so they gave up and left.

Here's a closeup of the statue that doesn't appear in the older vintage shots. Someone moved it here to the edge of the pool. That's probably how it lost its arms.

In the background, stairs lead up to the buildings that used to be the changing area, and eventually up to the mansion itself, which is currently a set of apartments. But up on that dividing wall is a fresh coat of paint and a sign warning of dogs, so I didn't want to venture too far up there. It's the pool that I came here to see.

So to conclude, I'm terribly behind with my blog, and in the time since I went here, the pool itself is now being looked after by someone, so urbexers who know where it is should probably stay away. I'm glad I got to see it in its decay. I'm not sure what the plans for this place are but if it ever was to open up to the public, I would definitely come back. If any of the statues were found at the bottom of the pool, it would be pretty cool to see those restored, but I also think that replacing any that are lost would rob the location of its authenticity. 

And that brings me to the end of this blog. Next time I'll be in an abandoned theatre. It's not the best abandoned theatre on my horizon or even in my past, but it's still cool. And then after that, I'm on a boat! But again, not the best boat I've got on my horizon either. Followers on Instagram will know what the best boat is. So speaking of Instagram, follow me on there. Follow me on Vero and Reddit too. They're alright. And if you're the kind of person who enjoys wasting their life as their brains turn to mush, then you're probably on Facebook and Twitter, so follow me on those too. 

Thanks for reading!

The tunnel of stolen cars

 

As opposed to my last couple of blogs, which talked of scandal and crime, and mild incest, this is a nice chilled one about a railway tunnel in a small town, hidden away by vegetation. It looks pretty cool now, somewhat like a fairy kingdom if all the fairies were Jeremy Kyle guests. The rails are all gone, and if it wasn't for the tunnel itself there would be barely indication the railway was ever here at all. 

It's strange to think that there was a time when all this would have been quite exciting to the locals. In the 1800s, nobody had cars, and these small rural communities were very much isolated from the rest of the world. When the whole railway thing really started to catch on, people were suddenly connected like never before. It's something we don't really think about now that transport is so widely available.

 

This tunnel was proposed in 1874, as a joint effort by the large London and North Western company, and the much smaller Merthyr and Brecon Railway, often nicknamed Murder and Breakneck Railway by the locals because every few months throughout the 1870s and 1880s somebody died in a horrific accident. 

Faced with looming competition from a larger company with a smaller body count, Murder & Breakneck decided to collaborate with London & North Western on plotting the train lines entry into the town, which resulted in boring this tunnel through a hill. The tunnel officially opened in 1879, and all of the important folks who had made it happen posed in front of the entrance for a group shot.

 (Photo not mine, obviously)

 

Allegedly the plaque above the entrance still exists, but is obscured by foliage. 

I can't help but feel sorry for these guys. Included in the shot, no doubt, is the foreman William Jenkinson, who oversaw the entire tedious process. The drills they used bored through rock at a rate of nineteen inches in ten minutes. An hours work rewarded nine feet of progress, in a tunnel that was to be a 1040 yards long. The fact that such things still stand, structurally intact, over a century later really goes to show how much skill and effort went into them. They have every reason to be proud. 

So it's kinda unfortunate that this is the way it ended up. All that hard work and fantastic engineering had a pretty pitiful legacy. The train service held three services each way on week days and four on Saturdays, but it ran a substantial loss for most of its lifetime and as such, it was among the first of many lines that closed in the latter half of the 20th Century. The last train allegedly came through here on the 28th January 1958.

 (Photo not mine, obviously)

 

This probably isn't a picture of the last train, but it is a train coming out of this exact tunnel, and that is cool.

 

(Photo not mine, obviously)

 

Likewise, so is this picture taken from a train in 1922. It doesn't quite line up with the tracks because there's actually another line splitting off from this one. 

 

There's another picture taken from the top of the tunnel entrance that shows it.

 

(Photo not mine, obviously)

I'm pretty happy that there's so many vintage photos of this place, seeing as the tracks and signal posts are all long gone.

 

 

Traversing rubble and litter to get across the swamp was pretty fun. There's a shopping trolley doing a great impression of that horse from the Neverending Story.

 

And here we have the entrance of the tunnel. Allegedly it was blocked up shortly after its closure, but that doesn't quite make sense. From what the locals say, people have used this as a shortcut for decades, with some of the older residents claiming they did so in the 1960s and 1970s, and many claiming that it should be open to the public as an official cycle path.

 

Allegedly the tunnel wall had a gap about the size of a regular door, but then people came with sledgehammers at some point in the 1990s to make the hole bigger. The council responded by blocking the new entrances with big fucking rocks, which seems like a half-assed effort, seeing as all anyone needs to get around this obstruction is a functioning set of limbs. But these rocks do serve a purpose. If they weren't there, this hole would be large enough to drive a car through, which is precisely what the folks with the sledgehammers intended.

 

The tunnel is pretty cool. I have a soft spot for railway tunnels, and I find it pretty fascinating that all this engineering and construction still holds up to this day, over a hundred years since it was built. 

 

The exact length of the tunnel is 1040 yards, although it's frequently incorrectly referred to as a mile long. At its deepest, it's eighty feet underground, and to expedite the construction, huge vertical shafts were sunk into the ground. They're still there to this day, meaning it could be possible to abseil into the tunnel too.

But what really makes it interesting is all the stolen cars.

 

 

I was initially frustrated by the presence of the cars down here, because the locals talk about it like it's the most ordinary thing in the world. Everyone knows they're down here, but nobody seems to question it. That simply isn't enough for me. I must know the story.

 

Most of the vehicles are now in bits.

 

Various other chunks of car wreckage are just strewn across the tunnel. 

 

 

I was determined to find the story behind the cars, and actually ended up talking to one of the folks who brought them here nearly thirty years ago, promising him anonymity for information. He said that it was a bit like "Gone in 60 Seconds," a movie I haven't seen but assume is about car theft. 

 

According to him, in 1995 he and his friends got some sledgehammers and bashed a hole in the tunnel wall big enough to squeeze a car through, and then they regularly stole cars, took them down here, stripped them down to just a shell, make a bit of dosh from all the parts, and then left the shells behind to be set on fire by another group of people. Allegedly at its peak, they had about fifteen cars hidden down here. 

 

Amazingly they were never caught, which initially baffled me because it's a small town. Surely a spree of car thefts would not go unnoticed. But my contact told me that they stole them from further away, never locally. That makes a lot more sense.

 

One of the ceiling shafts, shining a spotlight down onto the floor of the tunnel. 

 

Interestingly the chap who was in charge of sinking these shafts during construction was caught stealing two waistcoats off someones washing line. He ended up with 21 days imprisonment with hard labour. So really the tunnel had its connections to theft from the very beginning.

Whereas the line itself was so notorious for accidents that even the local papers in 1874 said that it was seemingly fated for misfortune.

 

I did hear a rumour of an accident taking place in the tunnel in 1880, but I haven't found any hard evidence. However with a series of railway accidents at the hands of Murder & Breakneck Railways, it doesn't shock me. 

By far the most devastating crash came in 1874 when a train going uphill somehow came uncoupled from its trucks loaded with coal. The trucks then plummeted back down the tracks, eventually reaching about 40mph, slamming into a passenger train that was waiting at the station, obliterating several coaches and sending the locomotive itself flying through the buffers and onto the street, where it took a four foot chunk out of a hotel. Miraculously, only one person died. 

Okay, so for her it wasn't that miraculous. 

But 52 people escaped with minor injuries and a few people needed to have their legs amputated. It could have been much worse.

 

That didn't happen in this tunnel, but it did happen at the local station so it does kinda tie into the history somewhat.

This Cavalier is by far the best preserved car in the entire tunnel. I do wonder if it could be restored. I wonder if its former owner even knows it's here.

Fuck knows what model this one was.

 

Towards the end of the tunnel, there are five "ribs" that took all of my energy to resist climbing on.

This was allegedly installed to support the tunnel lining, but I have no idea why it's just in this section of the tunnel and not more widespread.

 

Here we are at the end of the tunnel. It was a bit of a scramble to get to, what with it being a bit of a pond sprinkled with stepping-stones about as stable as a boomer at a non-binary meetup. But I made it!

 

This is particularly interesting because it looks like when the original wall went up, they still kept a door in it. It seems that when it was forced open by the gang, they bashed a hole around the door. The boulder, however, seems to be blocking the door. It's a bit of a weird set up. If the door wasn't there, could a car fit through here? Was a door fixed across the hole after it was smashed, to stop cars getting in? I just don't know.

 

This side does look a little more like a fairy kingdom. It even has a couple of trees growing out of the top of the entrance archway. It's really pretty.

So at some point, the powers-that-be got wind of all the car thefts, and instead of making any effort to actually catch the perpetrators, they just put big fucking rocks in the way to make it impossible to get cars in. It's a bit of a half-arsed deterrent. Sort of like the car theft equivalent of telling a woman to dress more modestly. It doesn't solve the problem. It just makes it go somewhere else.

To conclude, as far as urbex goes this one is perfect for beginners. You can walk your dog though this tunnel if you really want. They might enjoy it. The chap I spoke to who was part of the car-stealing gang told me that they regularly had sex down here too, so that's apparently an option for any lovebirds out there. If you're alone, you can walk through it naked, because it's so dark nobody will notice. I did walk it naked, but nobody was around to test that theory.

Anyway!!! On that note, that's all I've got. My next blog is a Victorian lido, which is very pretty. And then I'm looking at an abandoned theatre. In the meantime, people always say things like "I miss your blogs. Why don't you do blogs anymore?" And I still do blogs, you fools, you just don't see them because social media is an algorithmic hellscape that won't show people the things that they follow. But anyway, try your luck! Follow me on Instagram, Vero, Reddit, Twitter and Facebook. Maybe you won't miss my blogs. Good luck.

Thanks for reading!