Trend: Wild Swimming’s “Death” Has Been Greatly Exaggerated: There’s Actually Important Momentum
Week of June 12th, 2023
Will swimming in the Seine River be possible by 2024? Paris is aiming for it–Paris Unlocked
More details on the city of Paris’s complex plan to clean up the Seine to allow wild swimming for the public by 2025. It’s part of their mayor’s wider ambitious ecological plans for the capital, which also include a “regreening” of the river and its banks. There are skeptics, but the city is very serious, and has just appointed a deputy that will be in charge of the new cleaner, rewilded, swimming-friendly Seine.
Plan for wild swimming ponds in East London’s Waltham Forest a step closer–The Standard UK
Details on how a community group—The East London Waterworks Project—has hit its £500,000 crowdfunding target to transform an old concrete industrial storage site into two wild swimming ponds, the first new ones since Hampstead Ponds were created in 1777. It would have a capacity of 1,000 swimmers a day, and a real boon for those that need nature most, as there is a 42% child poverty rate in Waltham Forest. The goal: opening in 2027.
Wellness industry’s new, “wild” trend has some in travel ready to plunge in–Travel Weekly
Wild swimming has so much momentum that for more people, it’s worth traveling for. More hotels and resorts are incorporating it into their wellness programming—from Sweden’s Hotel J, where group ocean swims are paired with sauna sessions, to Scotland’s brand-new Bracken Hide Hotel, which has experiences like a “wild plunge pool” fed by spring water with cool Estonian sauna hut sessions. Travel experts see plenty more runway for the burgeoning wild swimming-related travel and hospitality segment, citing growing interest in “bucket-list” wild swim destinations.
Europe’s cities are nurturing a growing al fresco swimming scene with eclectic bathhouses, floating barge pools, and easy-access beaches and rivers–National Geographic
This spotlights some long established, and newer, natural urban swimming spots, all attracting more visitors since the pandemic. From Berlin’s Badeschiff (bathing ship), a heated pool created from the shell of an old industrial barge submerged into the River Spree (a kind of “wildish” swimming) to the Bjarke-Ingels-Group-designed The Harbour Bath in Arhus, Denmark, the biggest natural bath of its kind in the world.
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