“Then you have to have Biek!” Says the tall, gray woman in the swimming pool’s changing room. She has just decorated herself after her dive in the fifty -meter -outdoor swimming pool of De Vliet in Leiden, and now walks to the edge of the swimming pool. A little later a drip -wet, smaller woman with grumbled hair and lively eyes on the side: “” If it turns out that it is about the imminent closure of the swimming pool in 2012, she decides that this is more important than her daily jobs – she was just in it. She rushes to the dressing room, but not before she says: “Politicians are always talking about community sense, but they never wonder where they arise. Well, so everyone comes here. Children, professors, scratchers, athletes and canal swimmers: Irene van der Laan (Openwatermarathon swimmer, ed.) Existes here.”
In the spacious swimming pool there are on this cloudy Tuesday morning against the sixty people, the matinous swimmers are already gone. Seven fast crawlers are working in lane 1 and 2 with sports watches and training aid pieces, and in the three middle jobs mainly float students at Leonardo College: the last gym class of the school year is in the pool. They make bombs of the low diving board and are drowning on the high, and then suddenly all of the big slide in the shallow bath. In lane 7 and 8 a slow row of about fifteen people swims, some chatting and with dry hair.
Goffert, Nijmegen
Photo Bram Belloni
Krommerijn, Utrecht
Photo Bram Belloni
De Vliet is one of the approximately 230 public outdoor swimming pools in the Netherlands. Those figures come from 2021, it is not clear how much there are. That is about a third of the total 625 public swimming pools, which are operated by municipalities or foundations. One outdoor pool per 78,000 inhabitants – suddenly the absurd image of a hot summer day, with tens of thousands of people in and around a blue rectangle water, laid out with grass and some bushes. An absurd image of course; On hot days there are almost four thousand people in a bath like De Vliet. The rest does not swim or seek cooling on the beach or at rivers and lakes insofar as the law, blue -green algae, geese poo and associated parasites allow it.
Excitement
Outdoor swimming pool De Vliet is one of the baths in the newly released photo album by journalist Jim Jansen (who has already been Swimmer’s happiness wrote) and photographer Bram Belloni: The most beautiful 50 meters outdoor baths in the Netherlands. A non-swimming colleague who flared through the book muttered: “Swimming pools are not really beautiful, isn’t it. They all look alike.” But for swimmers – and According to research, more than half of the Netherlands is swimming In any case sometimes – it is a wonderful book. When you see the photos you revive the cold mornings on which reluctantly turned into the water in that special, full peace that swimming causes; Due to immersion, the sudden lightness, the rhythm of your battle and your breathing, everything bathed in light blue. Or, further back, you remember the crazy excitement of the child that runs over the hot tiles to the water, to jump in, to the stairs and again, and again, and again. Backward dive, forward head roll, just as long as just a bacon of a dime could expel the worst fatigue.
Ghost of closure
The book is about that magic, in this case experienced by the makers during a jealous road trip along the pearls under the outdoor baths; The fifty meter baths. They find school classes there, regular clubs morning swimmers, solitaire job drawers, families and a swimming mayor. The emphasis is on the photos, with a short characterization of the swimming pool next to it. Jim Jansen selected by “making calls in the swimming pool industry,” he says. Most mentioned: De Houtvaart in Haarlem, built in 1927. Jansen writes in the introduction that an outdoor pool is much more than a place to swim for half an hour or to float with your child. “They are meeting places for character -diverse people with a preference for activity.”
One old woman in a bathing suit says more than twenty banners
At several swimming pools, the ghost of closure appears, which always around these public facilities. The Baafje in Heiloo is in the danger zone, the Crommenije in Krommenie has been saved earlier, just like Zoutwaterbad KP Zijl in Loppersum and swimming pool De Vliet. Volunteers help with many baths. The exploitation is expensive, almost all municipalities are under great financial pressure, and the business against the outdoor swimming pool is easy: closed more than half the year, high maintenance costs, changing visitor numbers, and more a place for individuals than for associations that can lobby well. The book is not about that, and yet it is. “This book is an ode to those special places, not a pamphlet to save the endangered outdoor baths from closure,” says Jansen. “But it can be read between the rules that it is not good with the outdoor pools in the Netherlands.” A public swimming pool that closes is gone forever. “No municipality that will ever open a swimming pool.”
Bosbad, Amersfoort
Photo Bram Belloni
On the terrace of De Vliet, Biek Teeuwisse (67), now dry, says that the swimming pool has saved its life. “I am a heart patient and had to move from the doctor. Then you have to choose something that you like, and that you can almost always do. Like this.” So when she heard in 2012 that the new municipal administration wanted to close the bath, she took action. She picked up a few thousand signatures at the bath itself, and came up with a flashmob, “that was then in.” She also wrote a song that the swimmers would sing at the town hall prior to the austerity meeting. In bathing suit. “Not everyone was in swimwear, and the writer Maarten ‘t Hart was wearing his bathrobe. But an old woman in a bathing suit says more than twenty banners.” So on the melody of ‘Oh, Waterlooplein’ they sang ‘Red swimming pool De Vliet (Padadada)’. She still knows the text by heart and sings a couplet: Your grandson, neighbor, boss, your brother/ the silent and the ouwehoer/ the devil and his old nut/ who go to the Vliet.
Boschbad, Apeldoorn
Photo Bram Belloni
Oosterbad, Aalsmeer
Photo Bram Belloni
We succeeded. Provisional. De Vliet is open with the use of a group of volunteers, who run the mornings and the afternoons in the early and late season; Sometimes there is only one person from the municipality. “It is a vulnerable construction. But the swimming pool has now also been renovated. So we keep hope.”