Tooting Bec Lido Art: Why I Keep Painting Our Lovely Lido
Tooting Bec Lido art has crept up on me over the years. I never set out to make a series - I just kept walking past the place in every kind of weather and kept wanting to paint it. The lido sits about a kilometre from my gallery, and on a hot day like the ones we are having now, half of South London seems to pour through its gates. This is the story of why I keep going back to it.
My first lido, on a cold morning
My first lido painting did not come from a summer day at all. I was worn out after another early start watching Peppa Pig with a small child, so at about half past six I walked onto Tooting Bec Common to clear my head. As I passed the lido I looked in over the fence. The trees were bare, mist was hanging over the grey water, and there was not a swimmer in sight - and yet the coloured changing cabins still glowed through the gloom. It felt like a sanctuary in the middle of London. I painted that quiet, almost sacred version of the pool and called it Winter Lido. It was all about atmosphere: no crowds, just a still expanse of water.
A local landmark worth knowing
The lido is worth a few facts. It opened in 1906, dug out by hand as work for unemployed local men, and at 100 yards long it is still the largest freshwater swimming pool in the country - and one of the biggest open-air freshwater pools in Europe. It holds around a million gallons of unheated water. But the thing that gets me every time is the long row of changing-cabin doors in red, yellow and green, standing out against the turquoise. Those colours just cry out to be painted.
Our Lovely Lido: a South London summer
Once I had painted the lido cold and empty, I wanted to paint its opposite. In summer, the place is busy and multicultural, with people from every walk of life crammed together, having a brilliant day. So I made Our Lovely Lido bright, full of movement and fun. I put around one hundred figures in there - swimming, diving, sunbathing, chatting - and even handled the sky as a mosaic of colour. I had Lowry in mind, that way of scattering people across a canvas to tell a collective story, but where Lowry can feel melancholy, I wanted this one to feel like a celebration. I think I managed to get every walk of life around Tooting, Balham and Streatham into it. The idea is that you find yourself somewhere in there.
That turned into something I had not planned. While I was working on it, people kept coming into the gallery and asking whether they could be in the painting. So a good number of those figures are real locals, put in by request. I am in there myself, along with my wife and my daughter Summer.
Painting the same water in every season
After that, I could not leave it alone. I painted Spring Lido and Sunrise Lido for their softer, quieter light, and Autumn Lido Swim with a bit more warmth, hinting at a low sun going down around half past four. It is the same hundred yards of water every time, but I can paint it a dozen different ways, from almost realistic to almost cartoon. That is part of what keeps me coming back.
A nod to the 1920s
I have also painted the lido as it might have looked a century ago, with bathers in 1920s caps and costumes, in a piece I call Ladies That Lido. Outdoor swimming here is genuinely old. The lido belongs to the great age of British lido-building, when 169 were put up around the country, 68 of them in London. Only around 127 are still open in England today, so I do not take ours for granted.
Why the lido keeps its hold on me
Part of it is that the place never really closes. It is open every day of the year, Christmas Day included, and through the winter the South London Swimming Club - founded in 1906, one of the oldest in the country - has the water to themselves. Some of them break the ice on Christmas morning. Since 2006 the lido has hosted the UK Cold Water Swimming Championships, where hundreds of people race in water sitting at around five or six degrees.
Cold-water swimming has gone from a hardy few to almost a movement - just up the road, Brockwell Lido was recently named the only London entry on a global list of the best places in the world for a cold dip - but Tooting Bec has been quietly doing it for over a century. But mostly it is the stories. People come into the gallery, some of them in their eighties and nineties, and every one of them has a lido memory - usually of swimming here as a child. That is why I will keep painting it.
Take the lido home
Every one of my lido paintings is available as a signed limited-edition print, in A2 and A3, on archival matt fine-art paper. As it happens, three larger pieces are hanging in the gallery right now. The original of Autumn Lido Swim is for sale at £12,000, and Ladies That Lido, the 1920s one in its handmade frame, is £2,500. Sunrise Lido sold as an original, but I have made a large canvas edition of it, 150cm across and limited to ten, which is £2,500 and on the wall too.
If none of those are quite right, I also take commissions. The small watercolours I have been painting of the lido swimmers start at around £500, and they make a good present - one was given to a swimmer for her birthday by the friends she swims with. Whether you learned to swim there, brave the winter water, or simply love the colour of the place, there is a version of our lovely lido to take home.
To view the full collection and purchase limited edition prints, click here, or contact the gallery to ask about original paintings.
