ICONIC SWIM LOCATIONS
Open water has a long history. Every issue Kate Rew, founder of the Outdoor Swimming Society, traces the past of a great swim spot
THE RIVER CAM
SWIMMER’S GUIDE ○ Location: Grantchester Meadows on the south-west side of Cambridge. OS Ref: TL439 566 ○ Opening times: all year round ○ Safety cover: none – although busy banks of picnickers and dippers in summer, and a river full of punts year- round, mean you are not likely to be alone.
○ Temperature range: 4-22˚C, depending on time of year. ○ Contacts: there is free swimming from the meadows. Just downstream is Nuneham Riverbank Club, a nudity- optional river swimming club with a well-kept garden area and a wooden club house by the banks. It has no website or phone number – would-be members are tasked with fi nding their way down to the gate, knocking, and hoping a member is there to help.
There are just a few rivers in England
that mark themselves out as swimmer’s rivers, but the lazy, green Cam is defi nitely one of them. Driſt ing through Cambridge, it has a long and well-documented history of river swimming that has at racted poets, free-thinkers, townspeople and sportsmen. One of the fi rst riverbank clubs, Granta Swimming Club, was
founded here, and until the 80s it would stage regular races and long-distance swims in these waters. At one point, the club was a breeding ground for a new and revolutionary stroke – the front crawl! – and hosted galas between some of the 600 riverbank clubs around the country. Now it is home to Nuneham Riverbank Club – one of only two remaining across the country. The Cam’s appeals are numerous: clear water, overhanging trees, undulating waterweed and darting kingfi shers, and a large watermeadow – Grantchester – which has good public access and a multitude of places to enter and exit the water. The river has played the muse to generations of poets. Rupert Brooke's set wrote of skinny dipping here at night under the stars in a river smelling of “mint and mud”, while the band Pink Floyd were inspired to write, “A river of green is sliding, unseen beneath the trees, laughing as it passes, through the endless summer... making for the sea.”
Up until the 1960s, when the Jesus Green Lido was built, many local children still learnt to swim in a small tributary of the Cam called ‘The Snobs’. Lessons were presided over by unoffi cial teachers who would tell children when their swimming was strong enough to move into the main river. At Sheep’s Green bathing complex there were changing places
for boys and girls at opposite sides of the river, according to historian Chris Ayriss, author of Hung Out To Dry, and also for men and women. “For the men, a diving board, reaching up some
15 feet, a water chute and a springboard with a tremendous run-up ensured the success of the at raction,” he writes.
The gentle current is one of the features that make it friendly for swimmers: in the Cam it is possible to push upstream, as well as fl oat back down. A good challenge is to swim the whole length of the watermeadow, which takes about 40 minutes.
In summer the river is full of punts as well as swimmers. Navigate these with care (follow ducks underneath overhanging branches) and watch for the inept or drunk. The river is both public and private: while reassuringly popular, there are plenty of places to slip unseen between the reeds. Rope swings provide a more dramatic entrance to the water.
THE RIVER HAS PLAYED MUSE TO SEVERAL GENERATIONS OF POETS
The Cam has gone through the same periods of rise and decline as many other rivers – popular until the 1960s, threatened awhile with pollution, now enjoying a resurgence – but, unlike many other rivers, people have never really stopped swimming in the Cam. Recently one college warned against taking a dip aſt er a few students became ill following the traditional May Day jumping from bridges into the water. The practice went on undiminished, however. (As with all rivers, you can lower risk of infection by covering up cuts and grazes with waterproof plasters and avoiding swimming aſt er heavy rainfall.) “It’s my rebellion,” one swimmer said of her Cam-swimming-habit, “My chance to say ‘no’ to a constrained world.” Rupert Brooke, who – with fellow ‘neo-pagans’ Virginia Woolf and E M Forster – scandalised people with barefoot walks and nude moonlit dips here a century ago, would surely have approved. ○
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Portrait © Emma Critchley
Photo © Chris Ayriss
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