Bath Sports and Leisure Centre

My first review of this facility is immediately above. I swam another time in December, 2019, then three times in late February, 2020. I have swum during Christmas holidays, mornings, afternoons, weekends, and school breaks. I’ve always managed to get a good swim in. During school breaks the change rooms (and particularly bathrooms where over-excited little boys may not aim very well) get overwhelmed with screaming happy kids, but they are all heading to the leisure pool and slides. Two or three or four per lane max. I recommend this pool over the Sports Training Village at the University of Bath. Also very kid friendly.

In the early afternoon the pool was divided in half with three lanes (fast, medium, and slow) for lap swimmers and half pool for open swimming. There is also a small shallow kids’ pool so parents and young kids aren't trying to share the main pool. The pool is very shallow at the shallow end. It has good turbulence-control lane dividers. When I was there, there were about a dozen swimmers in the pool, usually two per marked lane. I was told by a regular patron that it was more crowded than usual for this time of day and was likely because the fancy 50m pool at the university was closed for the day (Christmas Eve). There was a little dirt on bottom of pool but no floating debris, and the pool and change rooms were generally clean.

There's a tiny sauna (six people a squeeze) and a (very) cold tub. There is no steam room or hot tub. The change room is set up in “village” style, with change booths for privacy. Lockers are 30p, non-refundable. They are operated by using small plastic disks available from machines in the lobby. The machines accept only contactless credit or debit card payment. My debit card would not work at the machine and I suspect that other foreign cards also might not work. In a pinch, the front desk will sell a token for cash. Each plastic token is good for opening the locker once. There are no token machines in the change rooms, so if you forget something in your locker (like goggles) you need to go back into lobby with your card to buy another locker token. Locker tokens were a subject of much discussion in the sauna, none of it in favour of this new system.