Technical Refurbishment
The lengths we went to
Listed Victorian baths in Camden have been painstakingly restored in a three-year project and now combine the best of old and new. Stephen Cousins reports.
ZAHA HADID’S AQUATICS CENTRE, with its gleaming aluminium wave-shaped roof, represents everything we associate with 21st century sports facilities: it’s highly engineered, iconic and inspiring. But the Victorians also gave the country a legacy of sports facilities that represent a different set of values: public service, community, human scale. Today, thanks to ingenious 21st century solutions and the resilience of the original Victorian design and workmanship, the building traditions of two eras can live side by side. St Pancras Baths in Kentish Town, north London, is one example of a
30 | OCTOBER 2010 | CONSTRUCTION MANAGER
Victorian treasure that has been rescued from oblivion by a £25.5m project run by Camden Council. The mistakes of an unsympathetic 1960s renovation have been reversed, the baths’ historic features restored, and its interior converted into a state-of-the-art swimming and fitness centre that includes a gym, dance studio, larger changing rooms and three swimming pools — all within the confined walls of the grade II-listed building. On its corner plot between Grafton Road
and Prince of Wales Road, the building is an imposing presence, its gothic turrets and pointed gables towering over the
local streets. When it opened in 1901, St Pancras Baths was more a public service than a leisure facility. With many Londoners not even able to fill a tin bath in front of the fire, the building’s four bathing pools, divided into separate 1st and 2nd class pools for men and women, 129 hot “slipper” baths and extensive laundry facilities, were vital for locals’ health and hygiene. But in the post-war decades, the building underwent several modifications. In the 1950s the womens’ 1st class pool was covered and converted into changing rooms, while a major refurbishment job,
The showpiece Willes pool sits beneath an elegant lantern roof, on display again after being concealed by a false ceiling in the 1980s. Inset: The Willes pool circa 1901 being used as a meeting room, and the imposing exterior on Prince of Wales Road
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