Saving Victoria Baths

10/03/2008

Kevin Harvey joined the hundreds of protestors marching against the proposed closure of Nottingham’s Victoria Leisure Centre.

11:10. Saturday 1 March, Old Market Square.
I’m twenty minutes early but already a sizeable throng has collected outside the Council House. Banners are being unfurled, stalls assembled, petitions passed around. Auspiciously, for a reporter writing on behalf of this eponymous publication, the focal point is the actual left lion, over which a banner bearing the red-lettered legend ‘Save Victoria Baths’ has been draped. A few kids are scrambling up the creature’s back and waving avidly at a camera. More banners appear: ‘Let us Swim’, ‘Fit not Fat!’

Today’s demonstration has been organised by the ‘Save Victoria Baths Campaign Group’ (or SVB), a St Ann’s-based organisation founded by Mat Andasun, one of the many regular service users at the Victoria Leisure Centre. The protest, after its initial gathering and pep address, is due to march through the city centre, finishing up at the baths themselves, where a meeting with council representatives is planned. This is not the first demonstration against the proposed closure. “But it’s a lot bigger today,” a protestor informs me. “Word’s getting round now.”

For those LeftLion readers who’ve never taken a dip in the Baths or rarely frequent the east side of the city, the Victoria Leisure Centre will still be familiar. It’s the place where, among other vital events, the Nottingham CAMRA Beer Festival is held. It’s that mellow red brick building whose characterful Victorian clock tower has, for over a hundred years, graced the city’s skyline. I’m sure you’ve seen it. You can spot it from various parts of the city, as I did this morning, right up from Upper Parliament Street, still holding its distinctive own among the more forgettable edifices now shaping up around the east side of town.

A megaphone brings me back. Sorry, I was gushing – sentimentality and all that. I see that the crowd has grown now: according to my crude counting, there must be several hundred protestors – or at least enough to make the queue for the Nottingham Eye look comparatively dinky. Yet it’s not just the numbers that strike me, but the cross-community range of people here: from school children right through to senior citizens, all of whom, so their various placards proclaim, are incensed by Nottingham City Council’s decision to close their leisure centre. A banner on the back of a protestor’s wheelchair says it simply: “Don’t take away my only exercise”.

I happen to look up at the resuming Nottingham Eye and can’t help picking out some of the showy slogans on its carriages: “Nottingham City Council: We are all PROUD of Nottingham” then “Nottingham City Council: Ambitious for the people of Nottingham”. Although questioning the former blazon, I certainly concede the Council its ambitiousness. ‘Ambitious’ indeed – for a feeling among the protestors here is that the Council has already taken the decision to shut the centre, a fait accompli, which perhaps explains the short time allowed for consultation over the closure. “It’s scandalous”, a local resident informs me. “The consultation process has been a shambles.”

A drum band starts up. Two stilt walkers, dressed in staring orange garb, slope into view. The drummers bang out an infectious, quickening rhythm, and then, somehow keeping up with the gaping gaits of the stilt walkers, lead the procession off.

We march directly towards Sneinton Market, passing along Smithy Row, Pelham Street and then down through Hockley. Taken in by the march past, people stop and wave. Shop assistants come to the windows. Passing cars lend honking support. From the top flight of a double-decker bus, there flashes a row of thumbs up.

Earlier this morning, after a few salutary lengths myself, I spoke with some of the bathers at the Centre. 'Bathers' is a quaint, nostalgic word, but a word perfectly in keeping with the historical context of the place. Vic Baths, a man informs me as he tugs his bag out a locker, was the city’s first public baths and washhouses, “where most folks came for their weekly bath.”

“It’s the kiddies that I’m worried about. Where are they going to go? Where are they going to learn to swim?” This is Frank Moore, a senior citizen who’s been using the Baths for the last 15 years. Frank hands me a letter he’s written to the Council. It’s direct and heart-felt, the print a little bleary from post-shower hands. “Where are they going to go?” he refrains, carefully folding his letter away and re-housing it in his pocket.

There are similar responses and more personal reminiscences from people out and about in Sneinton Market. But, according to the voices here, affectionate memories and historical continuity don’t count for much anymore. “I’ve been working here for 40 years,” one stall holder informs me. She’s a little wary of me at first but soon waxes once I begin to jot in my notebook. “It’ll be a shame. The clock tower up there’s looked over us since we first set up here. But there’s not much we can do about it.”

“Nana’s right,” her granddaughter joins in. She’s part of the family business too. “Once it’s down, I’ll reckon they’ll build student flats on it – just like all over the city.”

The march reaches the leisure centre. We filter into the main sports hall, where extra seating is hastily being put out to accommodate all the protestors. Today’s public meeting has been organised by the Campaign Group, not, surprisingly, by the Council. Despite invitations to Councillors Jon Collins and David Trimble, proponents of this building’s closure, only one representative of the local authority is present this afternoon.

I feel for Michael Williams, Corporate Director of Community and Culture, as he fumbles with his microphone, awkwardly angling it towards within reach of his mouth. “Well, I’m probably not the most popular man in the room.” He must be the loneliest corporate director in the world.

By contrast, if the whoop-whistling applause is anything to go by, Mat Andasun is the most popular man in the room. For him, the Council’s contention that the Centre has become too expensive to run is hardly surprising, given the lack of money spent on the facility in the past. Although Andasun doesn’t deny the place is in need of certain repairs, proper investment would, he argues, make it a truly first-class facility and help to address the “shocking” health inequalities in the area.

The mortality figures for this side of town are indeed “shocking”. According to Nottingham Primary Care Trust, there is a three-fold difference in deaths between St Ann’s and wealthier parts of the city. Although this might not be personally concerning for the only member of the audience who identifies himself as coming from Wollaton West (“Congratulations, Sir,” Andasun says. “You’re going to live to 79!”), for a number of people in the sports hall this afternoon, many of whom live in the most deprived areas of the city, this is small consolation. Their life expectancies will be at least 10 years shorter: 74 years for a woman, 67 for a man.

“Where my kids gonna go now?” “Why did we only find about the closure in February?” “What about the Council’s commitment to sustainable communities?”

We are now having questions from the audience. Sometimes, instead of questions, people make passionate, expansive points, as though their force of feeling were unable to be put into interrogative order. As tactfully as she can, the Chair, Jenny Elliott, has to usher them through these lengthy preambles to their questions, if they come. It’s an unenviable task: these are people for whom this afternoon might be their only chance to express themselves publicly, the first time they have spoken into a microphone. No matter how politely she asks them to come to the point, the audience, like some collective verbal minder, steps in. “Let her speak!” “Let him finish".

In the end, time wins out. There are too many questions; too many voices wanting to be heard. The meeting is brought to a close. Staff in their red T-shirts appear and begin to take in the seating. People begin to drift away, although others remain, still fervently exchanging with each other. Some track down Michael Williams. A queue is already beginning to line up in front of him.

I have my own questions to put to Williams. But I flunk it, worried that I’ll either effuse or be unable to articulate my despondency with the hard-hitting precision of Andasun. No matter: Williams has been beleaguered all afternoon and, given the cluster that continues to grow around him, is likely to be further beleaguered.

I don’t leave immediately, though. I linger awhile; take in the spectacle of the building a little longer. The place itself seems to invite it. Sunlight is now pouring in through the vaulted-roof and naturally illuminates the sports hall. With its cast-iron curves, the roof puts me in mind of St Pancras Station. Not as grand, I suppose, but no less fetching in its own modestly local way and most certainly what John Betjeman would have described as ‘pure architecture and engineering’.

Although no Betjemaniac, I try hard, as I finally leave Victoria Baths, to recall a fitting couplet from one of his verses - the poem about some intractable town clerk. However, grope as I do, it’s not Betjeman that surfaces, but an insistent stanza by M Nash of New Basford, whose lines, though perhaps not quite as polished as the laureate’s, are much more apposite:

God save Victoria Baths,
Long live these noble Baths,
God save the Baths.
Send us the cash we need,
To stop them going to seed,
Or to the developers’ greed,
God save the Baths.