Beverley Road Baths: ‘So easy to fall in love with’

This Place, a column by Vicky Foster

Exploring Hull & East Yorkshire

On a muggy August Monday morning I climb the stone steps beneath the twin cupolas of the Grade II listed building that houses Beverley Road Baths.

Today, after closing last June for its £3.7 million refurbishment, it will reopen to the public.

In a couple of hours, the first customers will plunge into the tiled pool, beneath the glass ceiling and the iron beams, and the balcony with its ornate gold and green railings.

They’ll pay only one penny each; the price customers would have paid on the baths’ first opening day, back in 1905.

We’re in a group of people who’ve been granted an early look around and we gather in the reception area for tea and coffee before our tour.

The green ceramic tiles of the walls are original. The moulded plaster ceiling has been preserved and painted in heritage colours. There is stained glass in the doors – green and pink and yellow – that lead away to the rooms we’ll explore shortly.

I’ve been visiting these baths on and off for most of my life, so I already know they’ll take us into a changing area and a gym, a steam room, and now a sauna – a new addition made during the works. What I don’t know is what the effect of the extensive work will be.

As we wait for the Lord Mayor to unveil the plaque marking the occasion, and declare the baths officially reopened, I chat to local councillor Aneesa Akbar.

She tells me that while out leafleting in the area at the weekend, she’s encountered a lot of excitement about the project.

Kids, in particular, told her they’re really looking forward to today. It is, after all, the summer holidays, and one of the many great things about being a kid in Hull has always been the swimming baths.

“I woke up really excited about it myself this morning,” she says, and I know what she means.

Bev Road Baths is one of those places it’s easy to fall in love with.

There’s something very special about swimming beneath the grand glass ceiling and balcony, especially once you know that Louis Armstrong once pursed his lips and lifted his trumpet in the very spot where you’re dipping your arms in and out of the water, puffing out your cheeks to blow and breathe in before submerging your head again.

Back in 1912 an application was made for the premises to be licenced for music, singing and dancing, and the pool – too cold to be used in the winter months - was boarded over and used for other things.

Not only did that include great artists who stopped off on globe-trotting tours; it also included ballroom dancing.

I get distracted during the talk about the refurbishment of the pool area because I’m imagining how it must have been – the whirling figures, the sound echoing up and around the huge space.

But I’m focused again in time to hear that the wooden seats on the balcony are the originals, which means that when you fold one down to watch the swimmers, you’re repeating the exact action people have been making for one hundred and sixteen years, as they sat to rest between dances, or cool off between dips, or refresh themselves with a glass of something good to watch the scenes below from a distance.

Because I’ve loved the pool area of this building so long, I think we’re leaving the most interesting part of the tour behind us as we move into the rest of the building. But I’m wrong.

The contractors point out that the timber arches in the high ceilings of all the rooms are also the originals, and I begin to pay attention to the pleasing contrast they make to the white ventilation pipes that snake below them everywhere we move. They disappear into white boxes at intervals, hidden behind wood cladding until reappearing in the next place.

It had been warm outside, but it’s pleasantly cool here. I stop and ask the contractors whether there was a ventilation system like this before the refurbishment, and they tell me it was bitty and broken down. This is all new.

“There was a problem with the atmosphere,” one of them tells me, and I laugh, because there can’t be many public baths buildings left in the UK with this level of ambience. But of course, that’s not what he means.

He’s talking about making the space usable and comfortable, and about preserving it. The council set the temperature and the ventilation system responds; the more bodies in the rooms, the more heat generated, the more the pipes and pumps do their thing.

I find myself becoming fully immersed in this element of the building, wanting to know exactly how it all works, because as much time as I’ve spent here, I’ve never considered what it takes to keep a swimming baths going.

There are now solar panels on the roof, and the energy harvested from them is utilised by the maintenance systems. The water in the pool passes over a clarifying heat plate before being recirculated to maintain the perfect temperature.

In the plant room, the wooden beams and arches support rails and curved metal sheeting, from which are strung fat grey pipes that run away into huge blue tanks. These, I’m surprised to hear, are full of fine sand and gravel through which the water is filtered, pulled by a centrifuge, before being pumped back into the pool.

There’s a panel of lights - green and red and blue-white – that glow steadily in the centre of it all, and lockers of personal protective equipment with chemical suits and ear defenders.

Learning about all this reminds me of something council leader Daren Hale said in his speech about thirty minutes earlier; many councils sweep away their old buildings to replace them with modern, faceless facilities, but Hull didn’t want to do that.

During a time of austerity and in the middle of a pandemic, they’ve taken steps to restore and rebuild this place, in the hope that it might last another 116 years.

I can’t even work out what the calculation would be to find out how many pairs of feet have walked up the steps and passed through the front doors in the last century, or how many might still do that in the years to come.

But one thing’s for certain, the pumps and pipes will be there, carrying away the hair and skin and exhaled breath they leave behind, and even though the scaffolding and hoists have been removed from the architecture now, it’s clear there are still support structures in place at the Guildhall, about a mile and a half from here, holding all this together.