The Ladies' Pond
If I close my eyes, I can sometimes transport myself back to the Ladies’ Pond, nestled from view in Hampstead Heath. Hampstead Heath sits to the north in London. One could call it a large field but I think it is so much more than that. It is a wide green expanse that is made of hills, meadows, and walkways, surrounded by trees, wildlife, and outdoor swimming ponds: the Ladies’ Pond, the Men’s Pond, and the Mixed Pond. The Heath was a place that stood out in my mind as a place of peace, as to my knowledge, it is one of the largest green spaces in London.
As we entered the Heath and began walking in search of the Ladies’ Pond, even stopping to ask a couple women if they knew the way, and receiving different directions each time, we caught glimpses of what the Heath had to offer. Our path wound us through tree covered paths until we reached the back entrance of the pond. Nestled between some trees we found a wooden gate with a small sign to tell us we had arrived. This all added to the mystery of the pond and a sense of adventure as we took to finding it, which was far more exciting than finding it by the front entrance. As the gate closed behind us, we walked alongside a thin meadow that filled the entire length of the pathway where women lounged and chatted. Some topless and absorbing the sun, others sharing a picnic with friends. The first glimpse I had of the pond was from behind the lifeguard who stood with her eyes fixed on the swimmers and the greenish blue water in front of her.
“To this day I still wonder if a single swimmer ever noticed. Somehow, as a lifeguard, you are cartoonishly visible — with your yellow jumper, your red whistle and your big white chair — and simultaneously invisible; just another piece of equipment like the life rings, the ladder or the hoist. A swimmer’s focus will always be, should always be, on the Pond, that strange surface dance between submerged and the open air world.”
I didn’t know at the time the impact this body of water would have upon me, and now over a year later, I can still feel the cool October air hitting my bare legs as I prepare myself to climb down the ladder and enter the 54ºF / 12ºC water. I can hear the water lapping ever so gently against the ladder, the banks of the meadow, and my legs as I enter the water. There are eruptions of laughter from the deck and shouts of surprise from those who have gone in before all exclaiming how cold the water is on first toe dip, waiting for the courage to dive right in and allow the water to take over, and wash away the worries we all allow to so frequently cloud our brains. A few women wore bikinis, which seemed exceptionally brave for these October temperatures. Myself and a handful of other women stuck to one pieces. Some, like myself, had a nervous yet excited energy as we each waited our turn; while others dived in straight off the ladder as seasoned pros. I would like to imagine the day in which I am the seasoned pro entering the crisp water in all seasons. I remember sharing a glance with a woman in the bathroom. I was at the sink putting in my contacts as I didn’t want to wear glasses in the water. It seemed too risky. My swimming suit was in the bag next to me, and she looked to have recently changed out of hers. We talked ever so briefly about the pond and the weather, then she was gone. I got the sense from her demeanor that she was not new to the pond and had experienced many moments in these waters.
On this day, the sun was out and shining down on us. It was the warmest day of the week with clear skies, though I don’t think I would have minded swimming in the rain, and had been chosen specifically for its temperatures. It was also the last chance to swim at the pond before leaving London the next day, and of all the things I had wanted to do and all the places I had wanted to visit, swimming at the pond was at the top of every list. The day began with moving out of the house in Brixton to central London for reunions. We all spent the morning drinking tea and eating sourdough square crumpets at Good and Proper Tea - a delight to have visited their shop in Clerkenwell before it closed last year - before heading off to browse through Persephone Books and figuring out how to fit yet another book into the already stuffed backpack, picking out a market sandwich from a wine store we found down the street, then catching the bus that would carry us to the Heath. A place that until this point I had only heard about but never seen.
“The ponds on Hampstead Heath are fed by natural springs originating from the River Fleet which runs subterraneously through the city. The series of ponds known as the Highgate chain — which include the Kenwood Ladies’ Pond and the Highgate Men’s Pond — were established in the late seventeenth century as fresh-water reservoirs by the Hampstead Water Company. The Ladies’ Pond was officially opened to the public for swimming in 1925, though it is reported to have been used unofficially for bathing long before that.”
I had first heard about the Heath in connection to Highgate Cemetery, a place I have yet to visit though it has been on my list for many years. Then about a year before this visit, I began to read more and more about this mystical Ladies’ Pond. Where I had first heard about the pond is a bit unclear. It might’ve been from Libby Page, author of The Lido, which was a book I followed for many many months before it was published, and who herself is an avid open water swimmer. Or maybe it was through articles I was reading about women across Britain who were swimming around the country or the stories about the winter swimmers who would brave the cold everyday, and through them I began to learn about the history of open swimming within the country, which is vast and expansive, like the water men and women have swum in for centuries. But each story eventually lead me back to the pond, and the more I learned about it, the more I had this burning desire to see it for myself and to swim.
Throughout college I was an active pool swimmer. I used to swim laps as a way to calm my mind or rehearse lines for an upcoming class or definitions for exams or arguments for papers. I would put my head underwater and glide, feeling the thoughts dislodging with each stroke, and hoping that I didn’t run into anyone else when the lanes were packed and I had the desire to backstroke. Which did happen on one occasion and then I learned to only backstroke when alone. It was a way for me to think and move, and an activity that always left me feeling rejuvenated and fresh. I also strangely like the smell of chlorine that lingers on the skin after. I remember swimming in the unheated Jesus Green Lido in Cambridge and how I swam the length of the pool, so much longer than the university pools I was used to, and so much colder too. It was a different sort of refreshing that I found myself looking for in other swims. There was something about being outside on a cool day. I remember eating eggs and soldiers with a pot of tea for breakfast at Bill’s before heading to the lido, stopping to buy new goggles because I hadn’t brought any with me, and the wooden changing rooms right along the deck. There was also the swimmer’s hunger that would set in after laps, and how I went in search of a bowl of soup after such a day.
I’ve swam since though less frequently and have occasionally visited my local outdoor pools which have a similar feeling as the lido from many years ago. I’ve even tried a handful of times to swim in the ocean but have never been able to get past the breaking of the waves. I can feel the power of the ocean and am often too scared by it to really dive under and reach the other side. I know the feeling of being pushed down by a wave into the sand. But the feeling of swimming at the pond was so much more than any swimming experience I have had to date. It was less about the laps and the distance, and so much more about being entirely present in the moment, watching the life moving around me and not worrying about anything other than my moving my body through the water. It is an experience of being entirely one with nature.
I felt like I entered a meditative state as I stood on the wooden deck of the pond. My mom sitting on the bench behind me with our plethora of bags and taking in the scene just as I was. It had been a while since I had stood in a bathing suit which can leave me feeling self-conscious and yet as I looked around all I saw were women of all shapes, sizes, and ages preparing to embark on the same journey as me. Some were in search of their towels after emerging from the water, or engaged in conversation next to the railing about their latest travels. There was a feeling of such belonging, warmth, and excitement. I don’t think I have ever felt this from any other environment I’ve been in before. The closest thing I can relate it to are the Korean Spa’s in which women gather to steam and bathe but there is something different about this space being outside. In which one is able to connect to other women from all backgrounds and ages, and do so in a space that feels open and freeing.
As I climbed down the ladder, I stopped briefly to catch my breath. The cold knocked me out. I kept going until finally I pushed myself into the water, submerging everything except my head as the voice inside of me told me to keep breathing, to keep going. It was just water. I was fine. I was fine. Keep breathing. My fingers and toes tingled. Slowly I swam toward the first ring, moving and stretching my arms and legs forward, as I began to acclimate to the cold.
“Here, my sense of myself was altered, the cold too shocking to focus on sorrow and confusion when the useful thing was courage, and when my heart had steadied, and I realised I was not actually going to die, the exhilaration hit me and I felt dizzyingly grateful to be alive.”
In front of me was a sea of green life-rings suspended in the water, aligned mostly in a linear pattern. I found myself hoping from ring to ring as I moved further and further toward the back which had no rings for meters. The pond is shaped like an oval that stretches between two meadows lined with trees, wildflowers, and the occasional figure lying in the grass. Although I had read about the pond, I didn’t know anyone personally who had ever swam there and certainly nothing prepared me for the tranquility that followed. I was unreachable. If my phone rang on the deck or if anyone needed me, I had no way of knowing. Earlier that morning as we had been packing our bags to move from the house in Brixton to head north of the river where we were staying for the night, I was simultaneously firing off emails about things happening over 5000 miles and eight hours away. My mind was trying to balance all the expectations and trying not to forget anything. It had calmed by the time I swam suspended in nature but it was only there, in the middle of this green and brown and blue water, where I couldn’t see my feet and my hands were slowly growing numb, that I was truly free. A bird flew inches over my head to land a few feet away. Water droplets from its wings falling all around me like my own rain shower. It was nothing short of magical.
After reaching the furthest ring, I began my journey back. I had been in the water for close to thirty minutes and could feel that it was time to go based on the growing numbness in my feet and hands. Experienced swimmers will say that in winter, it is best not to stay in for any time longer than the temperature of the water. So 12˚C would mean 12 minutes, 5˚C, five minutes, and so on. I didn’t know about this rule at the time, nor am I sure if it applies to autumn swimming as well, but it is a good thing to keep in mind for next time. I swam back to the stairs and back on top of the dock. I was ready for that focaccia and salami sandwich in the bag and my sweater. I was cold and yet warm at the same time. So full of life and equally as invigorated. I had done it, and all I wanted was to do it again. But maybe not right away as I wanted to be warmed through first. Thoughts about the pond come to me in those moments when I could most use the silence and moment to get away from it all. I can feel its pull and call to me. In those moments I do other things to try and find the calm within but lately the need for a dive beneath that frigid multi-colored water is strong. It took a while for my body temperature to return back to normal so we sat along the banks of the mixed pond in a semi-sunny spot eating our sandwich and salt and vinegar crisps.
At the Pond: Swimming at the Hampstead Ladies’ Pond was published by Daunt Books in June 2019. It is a collection of essays that captures the spirit of the pond and its many swimmers. Fourteen women lend their voices and experiences to the collection, and though they each have the pond in common, their relationship to the water varies. The collection is divided into seasons: Winter, Spring, Summer, and Autumn. Each writer connects their relationship with the season to their experience as a swimmer and observer of the pond. Some are summer swimmers who come when the queues are long and voices carry across the meadows, while others come to the pond when ice has to be broken off the water and bobble hats can be seen floating among the rings. Some talk about the way that the pond has helped them reach into the vulnerable sides of themselves and make peace with who they’ve become, mentally and physically. Climbing into a bathing suit in the first place is to deal with one’s vulnerable side. Others discuss the history of the pond and how that history is still felt among the swimmers today. All the essays are honest, from the heart, and a few attempt to challenge one’s perspective of the pond.
In Alice Sprawl’s review of At the Pond for the London Review of Books she describes the pond as thus:
“The meadow that runs around two sides of the Ladies’ Pond is surrounded by trees, planted to keep out prying eyes; the pond itself is small, and smaller in winter when the furthest depths are closed off. […] Still, for pool swimmers, the lack of lanes and shallows makes it a small sea. Once you have left the ladder, there is nowhere to rest, unless you cling for a moment to a buoy or life-ring, attached to ropes at the edges and the middle of the pond.”
This is a moment I think most swimmers will know as they come to the pond for the first time and even those that are frequent visitors. The pond does feel like a small sea where you can float and exist for a while, and that is some of the magic of this place. It is a small sea within the bustle of a capital.
“The Pond contains layers of translucent pearls and blue-green clouds. A family of black dusted ducks floats around me as I become aware of what my body looks like: disappearing, half swallowed by the deep. There’s nothing to push myself off from. I can’t touch the bottom and I can’t see more than a few inches underwater. I am not sure where the shape of me ends and the dark water begins. My own heart is the beating heart of the Pond. The only sure thing is my body. I hold my breath and swim out towards the place where the sun touches the surface.”
I finished reading Nina Mingya Powles’ essay “Small Bodies of Water” on the beach in Malibu as the sun set. I felt like it was important to begin reading the collection near water, as I was not physically able to get to the pond myself, as much as I would’ve liked to have been able to teleport or fly over. I had begun reading the collection a couple days before with the anticipation that I would be near the beach in a few days time. The first few pages were read in the bath, another way I tried to feel the water. I read “Pond: A Dendrochronology” by Jessica A. Lee during a lunch break where I went down to the beach for a brief walk after eating half of a focaccia and veggie sandwich. Jessica’s writing stuck to my ribs and fully captured me as I sat on the stone stairs leading down to the sand. She’s a winter swimmer who would came to the pond during a period when she was in the midst of a crippling depression. Her dissertation brought her to the pond as she was studying Hampstead Heath and the beauty and poetry of the winter swimmers. It was there during the winter that a tree feel and was being repurposed by one of the lifeguards, and it was where she began to know her fellow swimmers. It was in the water that her thoughts would quiet, just as the rest of the world would around her. I brought At the Pond with me to my women’s day gathering, and Jessica’s essay was one of the selections we read aloud as we sat over looking a misty trail and mountains below. It felt like it captured just the right tone.
So Mayer talks about finding reflection in the pond and society. From Dido Elizabeth Belle (the woman whom the film Belle is based), who lived at Kenwood House in the mid-18th century, the daughter of Maria Belle, an enslaved African woman, and Sir John Lindsay, a British West Indies navel officer, and who tried to enact change upon her society and witnessed the first ponds being built at Kenwood; to themselves. So talks about their experience with the pond and how it is too painful to swim there now, and about the continued inclusion of transwomen at the pond and those that are protesting their right to be there. Amy Key discusses the lead up to her fortieth birthday, the pressures she felt that surrounded the milestone, and her thoughts about whether or not she was one of the wrong people. She made herself a promise that she would swim in every body of water that she encountered in that year leading up to the big birthday. She lived near Hampstead Heath in her early twenties but never swam at the pond as she didn’t know how to float. Then as a newly forty year old woman, she travels back to her old world for a swim, and feels a little like entering her past but from a new sightline. Ava Wong Davies talks about her first time swimming at the pond after a bad break-up that still felt alien. Deborah Moggach has been swimming at the pond for nearly half a century, which saved her sanity as a young mother and continues to now. Margaret Drabble used to know the Heath very well as she lived there from the mid-60s to the late-90s and saw the transformation of the area. She writes that she once contemplated getting into the water during a lightening storm, which would’ve been ill-advised and very dangerous, but thrilling nonetheless. (She didn’t end up doing it.)
“The oak remained on the dock for a few days, a passing curiosity clamped to a bench. I watched the women come and count, still swim-capped and clutching towels round their wet frames, as they traced their fingernails across the wood’s smoothed surface.
‘This was the year I was evacuated during the Blitz,’ one surmised of the heartwood.
‘This was the year I first came to the Pond,’ said another. She counted backwards, bark to pith, to 1978.
I crouched and counted, as they all had. Eighty-two years concentric, give or take. Summer rings and winter rings, lightened and darkened. The wide bands of good weather years, and the tightened growth of dry ones.
One of the swimmers was eighty-two that year, so the women came to associate the tree with her, growing tall and lean and sturdy by the water. We tried to guess at whether the tree was the wilding sprout of a neighbouring oak, or if it had been planted, knowing that little of this small wilderness - the pond included - was naturally occurring.”
This is a small taste of what the collection has to offer. Like any compilation, there were some pieces that I responded to more on first read than others, but after finishing the book and letting the words breathe, the stories have all stuck with me as my image of the pond continues to grow and expand. It is a secret oasis within London that continues to inspire and shape the women who have walked through its front, or back, gate. Inside my copy are pressed flowers from the meadow which were very thoughtfully picked and brought back for me by Nadine. I didn’t sit in the meadow after my swim or linger. The cold was still in me as I re-bundled and we wanted a warm spot of grass to sit, and honestly, I am not sure the thought of embracing the meadow ever entered my mind. I imagine that someday I will visit again and sit along that meadow before or after a swim, maybe during the summer when the heat is lingering over the city, or maybe in the winter with a bobble hat of my own, swimming out to the rings.
The pond has stood for generations. Some will say that visitors to the pond has had a growth spurt over the past few years, which was around the time I began to notice its more frequent mentionings, and since visiting myself, I find that I am tracking the pond in a different way. The more I knew about the pond, the more I saw it mentioned, and the more I have met other women who know someone that has been. I cannot speak to whether or not the pond is more or less busy than it was ten years ago or even fifty for the simple reason that I was not aware of its existence. Further in the LRB review, Alice Sprawl writes, “Shouting about the ponds isn’t in the spirit of the ponds, but it has led to a greater and more varied body of swimmers.” I am currently one of those women shouting about the pond, and it was through the shouting of others that I found it in the first place. I want to keep the pond a secret, to keep it to myself, but I also want to share its green water with others, and to talk about my experience, which is why I am writing to you today, and why I imagine Daunt Books decided to publish the essays.
It can be incredibly hard to have something you love so dearly be put in the hands of a casual visitor and to worry about its survival, but there was a time in all of our journeys, where we were the casual one or were making our first introduction. Isn’t it also remarkable to see that look of recognition on a new visitor’s face after that first swim. To witness the magic that just took place. I like to think that with its ebbs and flows that the pond will survive for more generations to come. That its water will be there to welcome us with open arms on each visit and that we too can leave our imprint on it by helping to ensure that it survives for future women, and our future selves who wish to return and swim.
At the Pond: Swimming at the Hampstead Ladies’ Pond, Daunt Books, 2019.
Sprawls, Alice. “At the Ponds.” London Review of Books, Vol. 41 No. 17, 17 September 2019. <https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v41/n17/alice-spawls/at-the-ponds>
