SWIMMING
facilities and the opportunity for public membership unites academic and local communities to enable stronger links between the university and the town.
Private sector The private sector continues to pro- vide sports-related facilities in the form of health clubs. This industry, which was firmly established in the mid-90s, boomed in the early-2000s when rival chains fought for prime locations. How- ever, overcapacity, the credit crunch and a rise of operators specialising in the development and management of leisure facilities in partnership with local authorities have taken their toll on health club membership retention. To counter this trend, budget health
clubs have emerged to offer a low-cost gym experience but these tend to feature only the most profitable health club com- ponents – concentrating on the provision of closely packed fitness equipment and popular exercise classes. Their business model is unlikely to support swimming or spa facilities that are expensive to build and maintain or sports facilities that provide large spatial requirements for only a small number of participants. Health clubs are also now forging alli-
ances and exploiting links with the health and insurance industries. Cannons Health and Fitness was acquired by Nuffield Hos- pitals in 2007, as part of the company’s proactive approach to health and well- ness, with emphasis on prevention and screening to identify health risk. Aware of the burden that rising obesity levels will bring in the future, the insurance in- dustry is also looking at prevention as a preference to cure with many insurance
St Albans City and District Council has earmarked £16.7m towards a new leisure centre in its budget for 2011-16
Blaydon Leisure and Primary Care Centre is part of a £36m scheme by Gateshead Council
providers encouraging their customers to be fit, healthy and happy. Incentives come in the form of introductory offers or discounted health club memberships.
Big Society provider If Prime Minister David Cameron’s Big Society really flourishes as the coalition government hopes and expects, we may see a radical change in how swimming pools in particular are operated and developed in the future. There is a strong likelihood that local
government could be tempted to pass technically failing pools, or pools that are simply not economically sustainable to the local community through an asset trans- fer scheme. However, lidos aside, there are very few examples of where the local community has taken on and successfully operated such complicated assets. Up until now, most of the sports vol-
unteering sector has often been drawn to managing sports such as rugby, foot- ball or hockey, where little commercial or technical expertise has been needed (beyond the aptitude to create a decent social meeting place and provide excellent coaching and motivation skills) to effec- tively manage the physical place to play. The volunteering sector does not
currently have the capacity to step into
a volunteering role demanded for suc- cessful pool development and operation and this may be because the asset is simply too complicated. Umbrella organisations, such as the
Amateur Swimming Association nation- al governing body of the sport and the community sport funding body Sport England are starting to equip people with the expertise to coach and enable com- munities to rise to the challenge of club development, pool operation and asset improvement. Going forward, commercial organisations such as architect practices, building contractors and leisure manage- ment operators will also need to work with local communities in a different way to steer projects towards successful outcomes. This will mean that in order to allow
a local community to operate a success- ful swimming pool amenity, the physical infrastructure of that facility will need to be simpler, more economic and certainly more standardised. If the Big Society is going to be the big provider of swim- ming provision then more focus on how to upskill members of the community and how the stalwarts of the sector can help is undoubtedly required. ●
Keith Ashton is CEO and Mark Thomas associate director at S&P Architects
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Issue 1 2011 © cybertrek 2011
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