Track 17 · Water · 1:53
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Stop sixteen. The Kenwood Ladies' Pond, which opened in nineteen twenty six and is therefore a hundred years old this year.
It is the only lifeguarded women-only open-water swimming place in Britain, it is open every single day of the year, and it is spring-fed and unheated, which means about four degrees in February and low twenties in August. Women swim through the winter here in numbers that grow every year.
What is behind the hedge is a walled meadow with a concrete jetty, a set of steps into brown water, lifeguards, and a rule against photographs that everybody actually keeps. That last part is the point of it. There is nowhere else within a hundred miles where several hundred women a day undress outdoors, in public, and are neither photographed nor commented on.
It has been defended, repeatedly and successfully, by the association of swimmers who use it, ever since the nineteen seventies. When the City of London has proposed changes here, the swimmers have generally won.
If you are a woman: pay at the gate, take a towel, and give yourself half an hour. If you are not: the hedge is the answer, and the men's pond is four minutes further on.
Small charge to swim, and free to walk past.
South down Millfield Lane, with the ponds through the trees on your right. Keats met Coleridge in this lane in April eighteen nineteen and walked with him for two miles while Coleridge talked without stopping about nightingales, dreams, mermaids and metaphysics. Keats wrote the whole list down afterwards. Four minutes.
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