I’d never go to the beach without taking a dip. The taste of fish and chips is different when you’ve got sandy feet and the taste of salty seawater in your mouth. The seafront promenade appears different when you’re bouncing around in the ocean. Piers appear additional when you swim beneath them instead of strolling along from the top.
I went on a swim holiday to Malta and did not see much of Malta from the land. I didn’t see any of the most popular tourist destinations. Instead, I explored the island, swimming in bays and coves along stunning cliffs or lagoons. I noticed the land rising out of the ocean and immense, impressive churches on distant hills.
I’ve been swimming along the river Thames as I watched cows, fields, and reeds move through, admiring the luxurious houses beyond the lawns. Being submerged in water and your eyes at the water’s level alters how you view things. It is something about being submerged and naked that makes swimmers small, naive, and inaccessible. It increases your reactions to the environment.
Being in the city’s water isn’t any different.
Over the last couple of months, I’ve heard reports of an eerie outdoor swimming pool planned to be constructed near the Guardian’s office in King’s Cross, north London. The rumors were both slippery and obscure but oh-so thrilling. Someone has previously mentioned “the King’s Cross Pond Club.” It was captivating in its secluded exclusivity. When I thought I knew more, the sources I had consulted stopped and disappeared, and I was no more knowledgeable.
Two months ago, on a dark winter night, I spotted a planning notice affixed to a lamp-post on a busy street just outside King’s Cross train station. A statement of planning a swimming pool to be built outdoors! Did it be a reality? Did it have to be an outdoor pool area at King’s Cross – one of London’s fastest-moving and dramatic development locations? What? Is it a lake? Wow.
The spring of 2015 will see King’s Cross, whose skyline is populated with cranes, and the concrete foundations of new high-rises will offer affluent swimmers an exciting urban experience in swimming. The Pond is between several buildings at the far beginning of Cubitt Park, just south of Regent’s Canal; the Kings Cross Pond Club will offer an entirely new hybrid swimming experience. It’s an unheated, synthetic swimming pond, which is filtered with plants. The natural world also surrounds it. The project will allow swimmers to swim through a changing landscape in terms of the topography around the Pond and the evolving environment surrounding King’s Cross and its new luxurious, modern structures. The Pond will also serve as an experiment to create an ecologically self-sustaining, small-scale ecosystem.
The project’s official title is “Of Soil and Water: King’s Cross Pond Club.” The water that flows into the Pond for swimming will be cleansed through natural processes, employing wetland plants that clean the water and then re-feed it back to the Pond. The number of people permitted to enjoy the Pond’s swimming pool at any time will be limited to ensure an appropriate equilibrium of what nature can generate. Therefore, the emphasis is on a “club” – users of the Pond will enter into an implicit agreement to be aware of the equilibrium being created.
The Pond, written through collaboration with Ooze’s architects(Eva Pfannes, Sylvain Hartenberg) and architect/designer Marjetica Potrc, makes up a sequence of art-related events commissioned through King’s Cross Central Limited Partnership. Other projects by Ooze include Agua Carioca, a novel solution to the issue of sewage-contaminated waters in Brazil that utilizes plants to help build an integrated water system. Agua Carioca can be described as an autonomous, smaller-scale system of water management being spread to favelas in Rio de Janeiro. Ooze is focused on our relationship with nature and the obligation of us all to ensure that we create sustainable areas.
Ooze claims that those who come to the Pond will be stepping into “a living laboratory where they are aware of their relationship with nature, and about consequences of their interactions with nature.” They would like them to accept the responsibility for their relationship with nature. The landscape around the Pond will be an experiment that will “evolve and is planned to display a micro-landscape of the changing; the progression of different phases of nature connected to different water and soils. Visitors’ experience will evolve over the next period of 18 months.”
Swimmers will indeed be required to consider their connection with the natural world, but the city.
