Who Will get to Swim? – Mission Economics by Mariana Mazzucato

During these more and more scorching summer season days in London, the problem of who has entry to public swimming locations couldn’t be extra pressing. Since COVID, public swimming pools are not what they was: a mixture of toddlers with dad and mom, pensioners doing their lengths, and edgy youngsters from totally different socio-economic backgrounds messing about, flirting and screaming. Slowly, they’ve turn out to be quieter and extra orderly: adults with pre-booked slots. Small kids with dad and mom who had deliberate the outing days upfront. And virtually no youngsters in any respect.

Since the pandemic, the ponds and the swimming pools have moved to a reserving system, typically with a charge hooked up, that assumes a type of schedule certainty and disposable revenue that youngsters and decrease revenue households are much less more likely to have. Bookings have coincided with limits to the whole variety of entrants, and no underneath 16s with out a accountable grownup (16 yr olds don’t need to be with their dad and mom on a scorching summer season day!). Recent rule modifications at a number of London swimming pools have cited “safety concerns” because the justification for tightening entry—however this isn’t apparent. Instead of lowering numbers, one may put money into extra lifeguards, and in additional skilled employees used to working with younger individuals. Take a stark take a look at who these modifications really exclude, and a sample emerges that has nothing to do with security and every part to do with who a public house is quietly being redesigned for. I need to name this what it’s: a story of two cities, taking part in out in plain sight, within the two hottest months of the yr, in a rustic that’s imagined to have determined way back that some issues belong to everybody. It is, to borrow Dickens’s body, the most effective of summers for many who can plan and pay forward, and one thing nearer to the worst for everybody else.

And the pool is simply the place the story begins. The identical query hangs over the Hampstead Ponds which have turn out to be extra unique yearly for the reason that pandemic. And even wider each river, canal, lake and stretch of coast {that a} metropolis has fenced off, polluted or priced out of attain. We constructed our cities round water after which turned our backs on it. Reclaiming that water, not the tiled municipal pool alone however the residing waterways operating by our cities, is among the largest and least seen alternatives in city coverage.

We discuss an important deal in progressive politics about coverage: what to tax, what to subsidise, what to control. We discuss far much less about place, about what it really means to construct areas which are joyful and accessible relatively than merely permitted. My good pal, the designer and urbanist Dan Hill describes public swimming pools as a part of the “green and blue infrastructure” of a metropolis, bodily expressions of civic sensibility relatively than elective facilities.

I deal with these points in my guide The Common Good Economy: a brand new compass. The thought behind the guide (out within the UK since June, following within the US and different nations in September) is that we should construct economies for individuals and planet. To try this we will need to have targets which are clear, and ensure they’re pushed by a compass with 5 “elements”: clear objective, co-creation and participation, sharing of information, sharing rewards and transparency and accountability. The thought is that targets have to be set in ways in which make the relationships between all the important thing actors within the system as necessary because the aim itself. Aristotle talked concerning the telos (the aim) because the ‘good life’ and the ‘polis’ (the neighborhood) as tips on how to get there.

In the third part of the guide I take a look at the function of locations the place we be taught to be collectively and work collectively however particularly the place individuals really feel valued, with dignity and human flourishing on the core. These embrace public squares that are designed for interplay, public swimming pools, public libraries, and youth/neighborhood centres, all a part of the social infrastructure which determines human flourishing. London as soon as understood this instinctively. The Thirties have been the golden age of the lido: in 1937 the chief of the London County Council, Herbert Morrison, pledged to show the capital right into a “city of lidos” and set about constructing 13 open-air swimming pools, of which the grandest was Parliament Hill, opened in 1938 and nonetheless lined in its distinctive chrome steel. These weren’t utilitarian sheds however assured works of Art Deco and Moderne structure, constructed by public authorities on the premise that magnificence and open water have been issues a working metropolis owed its residents, not luxuries to be rationed.

In a current venture I take a look at the worth that neighborhood carnivals (from the one in Notting Hill in London to the one in Rio or Salvador in Brazil) have in creating social cohesion, networks and psychological well being advantages. You can learn extra about this in Carnival Economics and in my current paper on the Public Value of Arts and Culture.

More in ‘Section III: Places’ in my new guide, The Common Good Economy: a new compass

London’s personal parks provide a helpful precedent right here. Their existence as genuinely public, free, luxurious inexperienced house in the course of one of many world’s most costly cities was not an accident of historical past. It was a deliberate resolution, made by individuals who believed that magnificence and house shouldn’t be rationed by revenue. We are able to making that call. We have made it earlier than. The query is why we have now stopped making use of it to water.

Back to swimming: there’s a sharper historical past lesson within the story of public swimming itself. In the United States, municipal swimming pools started the 20th century as genuinely inclusive working-class services, then grew to become segregated leisure areas for wealthier white communities by the Nineteen Twenties to Forties, earlier than an extended and troublesome technique of desegregation within the Fifties and 60s. The historian Jeff Wiltse has traced what occurred subsequent: as swimming pools opened up, lots of those that may afford it merely left, retreating into personal yard swimming pools as a substitute. The consequence, in his phrases, was a extra atomised, privatised type of recreation and a diminished public life. Britain is just not America, however the mechanism, wealth quietly opting out of shared house as soon as that house stops being unique, ought to sound uncomfortably acquainted.

It has been resisted earlier than, too. In 1994, a neighborhood marketing campaign in Melbourne saved the Fitzroy Public Baths from closure, a second now remembered as a defining episode within the working-class defence of public house. Exclusion is just not inevitable. It is a alternative that will get made, and unmade, by individuals keen to combat for the precept that some issues will not be on the market.

The instinctive response from a cash-strapped council is that swimming pools are costly and troublesome to justify subsequent to extra seen pressures. This is the place I believe we get the accounting badly flawed – a primary misunderstanding of worth and a product of the extension of New Public Management idea into each side of public life.

Australia affords the clearest distinction. Since the early twentieth century, state and native governments there have invested in a genuinely decentralised community of public swimming pools, hundreds of them, unfold throughout cities, suburbs and distant cities alike, so {that a} pool is handled as primary native infrastructure relatively than a discretionary amenity for the areas that may afford one. It is near what the frequent good compass calls entry for all: advantages in-built from the beginning, not retrofitted as soon as the rich have already secured their very own.

Consider what that funding really delivers. A 2025 report from Royal Life Saving Australia calculated that the nation’s public swimming pools generate an estimated $12.84 billion in social worth yearly, from over 421 million visits. The identical report discovered that shedding simply 10 per cent of that infrastructure would value $910 million a yr in misplaced well being, security and neighborhood profit, and that 40 per cent of Australian kids presently go away college unable to swim 50 metres. One in 4 Australians, largely in outer metropolitan and lower-income areas, now has no native pool in any respect.

Those will not be tender numbers. They are the type of figures that ought to sit alongside NHS prevention budgets and youth service spending when a council weighs up whether or not a pool is “worth” retaining open. The value of inaction, in weight problems, psychological well being, drowning danger and the loneliness that comes from communities shedding shared house, is actual, and it’s presently invisible within the spreadsheets that resolve these items.

The danger is just not summary. During a single fortnight of hot weather in May 2026, 9 individuals, most of them kids and youngsters, died after stepping into problem in inland lakes and rivers throughout England. Water security specialists pointed to an absence of supervised, managed locations to swim as a part of the issue: individuals drawn to open water by the warmth, with nowhere safer to go and little grounding in tips on how to learn it.

The drawback is just not cost-benefit evaluation as such. The drawback is that we run it with half the ledger lacking. Once the advantages of investing in swimming, and in sport extra broadly, are literally counted, the case is just not marginal, it’s overwhelming: the bodily and psychological well being returns, the preventative financial savings to the NHS, the discount in loneliness and delinquent behaviour, the social cohesion constructed by individuals of various backgrounds sharing the identical water.

These will not be tender or unmeasurable items. They are merely items that our appraisal strategies have been designed to not see, as a result of they accrue over a long time, land in different departments’ budgets, and don’t present up as income on a leisure centre’s steadiness sheet. Health relies upon not solely on therapy after sickness however on the social and financial circumstances, safe housing, neighborhood, train, pleasure, that forestall sickness within the first place.

A pool is among the plainer expressions of that precept we have now. So allow us to not throw out analysis altogether. Let us insist on analysis that’s sincere about worth: that counts a baby’s physique, a teen’s afternoon and an aged particular person’s mobility on the profit facet of the ledger, the place they’ve all the time belonged.

There is a extra basic query on the coronary heart of this challenge, which is about whose consolation and security a public house is designed to guard, and whose presence it’s quietly designed to discourage. One metropolis books forward, pays the charge, and barely notices the system is there. The different finds the door quietly closed and is instructed it’s for their very own security.

When reserving methods and charges are launched with out a corresponding effort to succeed in the households least more likely to plan forward or pay upfront, and when “safety” guidelines land disproportionately on working-class youngsters, relatively than on the behaviour that supposedly justifies them, the impact is exclusion, regardless of the intent. This is just not a uniquely British story. It echoes the historical past of segregated American swimming pools, and the flight of personal wealth away from shared water as soon as that water stopped being unique. The particular mechanism modifications. The underlying intuition, to withdraw the frequent good the second it’s genuinely shared, doesn’t.

We should demand solutions to questions like:

• What is the mission assertion of our public swimming pools – who do they serve?

• Who is consulted round this mission (e.g. outdoors the City of London for Parliament Lido?)?

• What is being completed to make sure those that profit essentially the most have biggest entry (e.g working class youngsters) Is it actually that tough, for instance, to safeguard 300 passes for younger individuals from native estates?

• H· How can we be as bold as doable on the design of at the moment’s public areas, creating lovely locations the place all really feel valued? As I talk about in my guide, there are nice classes right here from Mexico City’s UTOPÍAS, the community of enormous, fantastically designed public centres, full with swimming swimming pools, constructed within the metropolis’s most uncared for boroughs on the precept that the poorest communities deserve essentially the most bold structure, not the least.

So what would it not appear to be to truly repair this, relatively than merely lament it?

I’d suggest a mission: a swimmable place inside fifteen minutes of everybody’s residence, whether or not that could be a pool, a lido, a river or a lake, by the top of this decade. This is exactly the type of outcomes-oriented goal that mission-driven coverage is constructed for: bold, measurable, and requiring real coordination between councils, water corporations, transport planners and builders relatively than a single division working alone.

A mission like this has two halves, requiring work throughout sectors and Government ministries, and each matter. One is the correct to swim: secure, wholesome, accessible water that nobody is priced or deliberate out of. The different is the correct to find out how. A river reopened for swimming does little for a kid who was by no means taught, which is why the Australian determine on kids leaving college unable to swim ought to fear us as a lot as any query of entry. Reclaiming the water and educating individuals to make use of it are the identical venture. In Britain that hole is, above all, a spot of sophistication. Sport England’s Active Lives information exhibits that 86 per cent of kids from essentially the most prosperous households can swim 25 metres unaided by the top of major college, towards simply 42 per cent of the least prosperous. Swim England finds the identical sample by geography: 45 per cent of kids in essentially the most disadvantaged areas of the nation can swim the gap, towards 76 per cent within the least disadvantaged. Ethnicity compounds this sample relatively than changing it. The Black Swimming Association stories that 95 per cent of Black adults and 80 per cent of Black kids in England don’t swim repeatedly. But the equal figures for White British adults and kids, 89 and 71 per cent, are hardly an image of well being both. The kids being priced and deliberate out of the water are as more likely to be white as Black. What they overwhelmingly have in frequent is just not ethnicity however revenue and postcode.

It is just not a fantasy, and it’s already additional alongside than most individuals in Britain realise. The international Swimmable Cities initiative now brings collectively 255 organisations throughout 121 cities and cities in 39 nations, of which 18 are municipal signatories to its constitution, with extra in practice. Its Community of Practice for metropolis governments and water authorities counts 55 cities throughout 5 continents. The constitution’s first precept is apparent: secure, wholesome and swimmable waterways must be accessible to all. The Mayor of London’s Office has already signed it, and Deputy Mayor Mete Coban has turn out to be a real champion for the trigger.

Two nationwide examples present what occurs when governments deal with this critically relatively than as a summer season novelty.

The Dutch have gone furthest. In July 2024 the cities of Rotterdam and Utrecht, alongside Waternet, Amsterdam’s water authority, signed the Swimmable Cities Charter. By June 2025 the motion’s summit was being run in partnership with the City of Rotterdam and the Dutch Ministry of Infrastructure and Water Management, and the nation’s Minister for Water is now backing a nationwide dialogue on what officers there name “swimmability”, clear, secure, accessible swimming water as a matter of public coverage relatively than personal luck.

France has taken a unique however equally instructive route. The clean-up of the Seine for the 2024 Olympic triathlon and marathon swim was not a one-off spectacle: greater than 100,000 individuals swam within the river over the summer season of 2025, and Paris now runs a technique for greater than thirty swimming websites throughout the better metropolitan space, with different French cities following. The metropolis treats city swimming explicitly as a public service, free on the level of use, and the thought has entered nationwide politics, with senior figures calling for a “national swimming plan” as a part of adapting to a warmer local weather.

We additionally have already got the coverage mechanism to ship this at council stage. Working with Camden Council, we set out how outcomes-oriented procurement, judging contracts on the general public worth they ship relatively than the bottom sticker worth, can reshape how an area authority commissions every part from housing to leisure companies. There is not any motive that very same method couldn’t be utilized on to how London’s swimming pools are run, staffed and priced.

None of this occurs with out individuals keen to push it. In London we have already got a foothold: the Mayor’s Office has signed the Swimmable Cities Charter, and Deputy Mayor Mete Coban is making the case from inside City Hall. I’d wish to see London’s civic and enterprise management, together with the City of London Corporation, take this on instantly, alongside the type of pondering Zohran Mamdani has dropped at the general public worth of shared house in New York. This is just not charity. It is an funding within the type of metropolis we really need to dwell in.

We have two months of summer season left. That is just not very lengthy. But it’s precisely the type of urgency that ought to focus minds, as a result of the choice, one other yr of quietly deciding that some kids get a summer season by the water and a few don’t, is a alternative, not a reality of life. We can select otherwise.

Black Swimming Association (2024). thebsa.co.uk — citing Sport England, Active Lives Survey (2020) information on swimming participation amongst Black and Asian communities in England.

Sport England (2024). Active Lives Children and Young People Survey. Data on swimming attainment by household affluence and space deprivation.

Hill, D. (2016). Dan Hill on swimming swimming pools as Australia’s reply to the piazza. Dezeen, 10 May.

Mazzucato, M. (2026) The Common Good Economy: a brand new compass. Penguin Allen Lane.

Mazzucato, M. and Wainwright, D. (2024). Mission-led procurement and market-shaping: Lessons from Camden Council. UCL Institute for Innovation and Public Purpose.

Royal Life Saving Society Australia (2025). State of Australian Aquatic Facilities 2025.

Swimmable Cities Alliance. The Swimmable Cities Charter. swimmablecities.org

Wiltse, J. (2007). Contested Waters: A Social History of Swimming Pools in America. University of North Carolina Press.