Sansome Walk – The Silent Leisure Centre

A couple of weeks ago I had the opportunity to explore a disused leisure centre in my home city of Worcester. As somewhere I’d been a fair few times when it was open there was a hint of nostalgia, combined with the excitement and awe that came along with being able to freely explore this otherwise closed to the public place. What I didn’t quite anticipate was the silence.

There’s something eerie about abandoned buildings, especially buildings that would have once been so filled with life. This building was opened in 1970, and in the near 47 years it was in operation since, I can’t imagine there was a single moment that anything even close to silence occurred within its walls. Even in the dead of night there would no doubt have been rumblings from the heating and filtration systems in the basement. Of course in the daytime there would also have been screams of children playing and jumping from the diving boards, the whistle of the life guards reprimanding people for running, bombing or (god forbid) “petting”. There would have been the shouts from spectators bellowing at competitions from the gallery that overlooked the pool, and the just-about-discernible messages put out over the tannoy system. And then there was the gym with various classes and the monotonous drones of exercise machines, the hubbub in the reception area, the rattle of drinks and food dropping into the bottom of vending machines, hair dryers, lockers opening and closing, bubbling jacuzzis, tired and upset kids and frustrated parents. All familiar noises to anyone who’s ever visited a swimming pool leisure centre. But now all that has been entirely replaced by a profoundly apparent and completely dead silence.

The place was eerie, and it was definitely the silence that made it feel that way – especially at this stage of deterioration. Many of the signs of life were still intact. Keys were still in lockers ready to be used, the lifeguards seat still in position, bins waiting to be filled, time charts and posters still on walls. There was also a pile of floatation aids with one of them still inflated with breath exhaled by someone well over a year ago. It was just sat there in the corner by the teaching pool, presumably exactly where it was left the last day someone tried to teach their kid to take the first swimming strokes just meters away – they might have even used it.

Yet all these signs of life were surrounded by signs of deterioration and impending destruction. The water from the pools had been drained for a start, but as well as this, everything of any real value that wasn’t stuck down or too heavy to move has been removed. There’s now boards covering windows, railings surrounding the pools altering once familiar views across the pool of the murals, the clocks on the walls and entrance/exits to the changing rooms. The diving boards are gone too, rust has started taking over, there’s dust and dirt everywhere, and peppered around the building there’s holes in the walls and floor where the asbestos surveyors have investigated the extent to which that once-used carcinogen was knitted into the fabric of the construction (a lot, by all accounts). There was even the addition of a gas mask left by one of the surveyors, and believe it or not, a shit left in a toilet that no longer had the capacity to flush.

The Silence

Yet the most apparent new feature of the building was the silence. It almost felt like the calm before the storm of the building being levelled, the re-building on the site, and the new noises that will inevitably emanate from the buildings that will replace it. It’s this quiet that I hope I’ve captured something of in my photos.

The reception

Changing rooms

The Pool

The Gallery

Downstairs

Behind the scenes

For all these photos, I actually organised the visit to take some more shots for my Unremarkable Architecture project. The images I took of the outside of the building can be found here.

Finally, I just wanted to say thanks to David, Nicky and Mark for enabling, helping to organise and giving the tour!

Cheers,

Hamish

If you like this sort of thing, you can find more of my shots from a previous tour around a disused local BT office building here

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