Keep cool at the pool

In Thirties London, before melanoma entered everyday language, sunbathing was in and swimming, not yoga, was the favoured route to health and fitness.

Outdoor pools in the form of lidos were the place to enjoy both. So popular were they that more than 30 were built in London alone, but now, their heyday long gone, London's lidos are in decline.

In the Eighties cost-cutting councils were forced to pull the plug on many of the capital's outdoor pools and in this decade only a handful remain.

In homage to London lidos past and present, photographer Valentine Schmidt has produced a series of images of three of them - Tooting Bec and Brockwell Park, still in use, and Twickenham Lido, derelict for 15 years.

Instead of photographing people having fun in the sun, Schmidt has taken a more poetic approach and, shooting only in winter, has homed in on the surface of the water and, when empty, the pool bottom itself. Twickenham's cracked and graffitied floor and the line markings on the bottom of Brockwell's pool, drained for the winter, both appear like abstract paintings while the water in Tooting's pool has its surface broken by floating leaves and ice. 'The images are about showing the decline of the lidos but also something of their beauty,' Schmidt explains, 'because even when you have to crack the ice they're still the best places to swim.'

Valentine Schmidt: Plunge
Mon 3-Sun 23 Dec,
Tart, 52 Ferndale Road, N15 (020-8211 0958).

Photography: Laughter and celebration of Jews