Ripple effects: two projects to restore much-loved lidos

The British love affair with lidos dwindled after their heyday in the first half of the 20th century, but the passion is being rekindled. According to the Outdoor Swimming Society, 7.5 million people in the UK venture into rivers, lakes, lidos and seas to swim.

From Penzance to Plymouth and Portsmouth, the country’s old lidos are enjoying a resurgence, with a flood of award‑winning renovation projects restoring their Art Deco beauty and making them sustainable for future generations. We jumped into two lido projects to see the work that goes on beneath the surface…

Hilsea Lido celebrates 90 years

As lidos combine community, exercise and heritage, they tend to be very emotive – and that can create challenges for project professionals. Take Portsmouth’s Hilsea Lido, which has been closed for three years for renovations. Highly invested locals are closely following the team’s progress updates, and some don’t exactly hold back in the comments section.

For Harvey Bevan, who became Portsmouth Council’s Project Manager for the lido in August 2023, the £7m project has been a valuable lesson in the power of communication. Bevan has been attending design meetings with the council, the project consultant and the contractor, where he feeds in ideas he’s gathered from engagement sessions with residents. He then has to explain the rationale for any decisions back the other way.

“The lido had a lot of unique features that people wanted to keep,” he explains. “It had a spectator gallery, which would have fallen down within five years. There was a high diving platform, a roof terrace and a long changing room building. But while the £7m we have for the project may seem like a lot, it doesn’t go very far. We’ve spent a third of it in the ground [on pipework and filtration systems], doing things that you’d never see at the end.”

In at the deep end

The depth of the new lido has been another thorny issue. The pool used to be 4.8m deep in the middle. The revamped pool will be two metres shallower there. The reason: when the pool was emptied of water, and relieved of the downward pressure from that weight, the uplift from below cracked its old liner. “The old liner was described in one meeting as effectively being a boat, it was so buoyant,” says Bevan.

“We had to put enough concrete and steel back in the pool to hold it down.” The new depth of 2.8m allowed the project team to solve that problem while retaining the beloved pool’s familiar profile.

The team has also installed a new “self‑healing” liner. If this new structure fails, the water that enters the cracks will react with a special additive in the concrete, which will expand to seal it back up. Which is an apt metaphor for Bevan’s gluing those parts of the project together.

“Telling a story as to how you’ve got to a certain point, and helping people understand why you had to make the decisions you made, is very important,” says Bevan. “That’s what I’ve learned the most from this project.” Hilsea Lido is on course for an early autumn opening, still in time for its 90th anniversary.

Cheltenham Lido stays afloat

When Cheltenham Lido opened in 1935, it was a rare example of an outdoor pool that was heated and chlorinated. Today, its owners have jumped into that same lane of forward‑thinking engineering to future‑proof its energy supply.

One factor in the closure of many lidos is that they’re expensive to run, especially when bills are soaring. Solar panels would help offset those costs, but as they tend to lack roofs, lidos aren’t exactly the best place to house them. When the Cheltenham team began to plan a car park renovation, as a first step in modernising the overall premises, they realised it was the perfect place to install canopies that could hold such panels.

In the fast lane

Last summer, the lido secured a £300,000 grant from Sport England for its solar revolution. The only snag: the money had to be spent by the end of March this year.

“We had nine months to get the project finalised, started and finished, which was always going to be a very tight timeline,” says Joe Berry, Cheltenham Lido’s Assistant Manager. “But with the incentive of getting £300,000, as opposed to having to use £300,000 of our own money, we cracked on.”

One challenge was getting the project through planning. This was sensitive, as the lido is a Grade II‑listed heritage site. They also had to overcome objections to the landscaping plans, which involved cutting down existing trees and shrubs to prevent shading of the panels.

But the biggest issue was time. “It was a massive effort by everyone to get it completed in time,” says Berry. “The groundwork company we had was amazing. They had 19 weeks to complete the work for the car park. And that included digging out large areas, resurfacing everywhere with all new tarmac and installing 500 solar panels.”

The team has also made the lido more sustainable by encouraging visitors to use cleaner forms of transport – with EV chargers, better bike storage and safer pedestrian access.

The lido should continue to stay afloat – whatever the economic weather.

“The panels should provide us with 93% of our electricity,” says Berry. “That’s a huge cost burden taken away. And we know we’re secure if energy prices do spike. We wanted to become more sustainable, and we would have done so anyway. But we now know that we have this massive safety net.”

Read the summer 2025 issue of APM’s Project for the full story.