On a sunny weekend in January, scores of swimmers descended on Tooting Bec Lido in south London. More than 300 of them - some from Finland, the US and even Australia - plunged into the unheated water of London's biggest pool to take part in the UK's first cold-water swimming championships. Tessa Jowell, the minister for culture, media and sport, was not among them - despite declaring, in reply to a question in the House of Commons that same month, that she took the occasional dip in the Hampstead Heath ponds.
The revelation came in response to a question from Vincent Cable, the Lib-Dem MP for Twickenham. He was pressing the minister on why Sport England, which distributes sports lottery funding, discriminated against open-air swimming pools by consistently denying them grants. Its hostility came to light six years ago when Hampton Pool, in Cable's constituency, was repeatedly refused funding on the grounds that open-air pools were outdated, unpopular and bad value for money.
As it happens, Hampton Pool is heated, open 365 days a year and sells in the region of 100,000 tickets annually. Its popularity is not in question. Today, Sport England says it assesses applications from lidos on their value as community facilities and how they will increase participation. Their seasonal opening - with a few notable exceptions - means they always fall down on the latter. Yet Sport England also says it will award grants for swimming activities that offer opportunities to "foster social inclusion, boost health and combat crime".
I can think of no sporting arena that better meets all those criteria than an open-air swimming pool. As Sir Josiah Stamp, the president of the London, Midland and Scottish Railway, said at the opening of the Morecambe Super Swimming Stadium in 1936: "When we get down to swimming, we get down to democracy." But, to date no outdoor pool has received a penny of the £2.2bn sports lottery money dispensed since 1994. Manchester United, the world's second most commercially successful football club, was recently awarded £30,000 to help improve the health of its staff.
That would be enough to run a small community open-air pool - such as at Woburn, Bedfordshire, or Cirencester, Gloucestershire - for a summer season. And would allow a greater number of people to improve their health, not just a select band of employees. The irony is that the Heritage Lottery Fund has been much more benevolent to outdoor pools, providing grants ranging from £294,000 to the Jubilee Pool in Penzance to nearly £500,000 to Brockwell Lido in south London. Both of these 1930s pools are listed buildings. The unavoidable conclusion is that Britain's lidos are cherished more for their architectural splendour than for their sporting possibilities - and this at a time when the government is committed to tackling obesity both in children and adults.
A change in Sport England's policy towards open-air pools is the key demand in a document that I will be delivering later today to the Department for Culture, Media and Sport. The document is a summary of the Reviving Lidos conference held in London in March, when, for the first time, swimmers, local authorities, architects and trustees of swimming pools were able to come together to discuss a way forward. Jowell responded to Cable's question in January that she would be "happy to take up that important matter" - of Sport England's hostility towards openair pools. We hope the findings of Reviving Lidos will remind her of that pledge.
· Janet Smith is the author of Liquid Assets, published by English Heritage, £14.99. G
