Track 18 · Water · 1:37
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Stop seventeen. The Highgate Men's Pond.
Also open every day of the year. Also lifeguarded, also unheated, and rather less discreet than the one you have just walked past: there is a diving board, a concrete deck, and a large meadow beside it where the sunbathing has been famously and legally unclothed for decades.
In midwinter, when the water is close to freezing, there is a queue. The men who swim here through January are mostly not athletes, they are simply people who have decided that this is what they do, and the club culture around it goes back well over a century.
Three ponds on this Heath are open for swimming and it is worth knowing the difference. The men's pond and the ladies' pond run all year. The mixed pond, further down the other chain, only opens from April to October. All of them are lifeguarded, all of them charge a few pounds, and none of them will let you in when the lifeguards have gone home. That is not bureaucracy. It is cold, deep, dark water with weed in it, and people who have ignored that rule have died in it.
Small charge to swim.
Leave the lane and strike west across the Heath, uphill, away from the water. Aim for the trees on the skyline. Seven minutes, and you are looking for a low round mound inside an iron fence, which is easy to walk straight past.
51.56475, -0.15905 · where this is on a map