When I moved up to Manchester this year to become the Guardian’s northern editor, one of the things I was most sad about leaving was my local lido. There are no outdoor pools in Greater Manchester and, having become used to seeing the sky as I bashed out my leisurely backstroke, I wasn’t looking forward to doing my lengths under striplights again.
But in spring a triathlete friend who moved up around the same time to work for the BBC said she had seen people thrashing about in the water next to Media City in Salford. She did some investigating and reported back that each Wednesday evening and Saturday morning from May to September a company called Uswim offered sessions in Dock 9, one of the closed-off sections of Salford Quays by the Lowry Centre.
I later learned that on Mondays, Tuesdays and Thursdays the council-run Salford Watersports Centre in the smaller neighbouring dock – the more exotically named Ontario Basin – also offered open water swimming on a 500m course around the new wakeboard park.
To swim at either costs a fiver a throw, plus a small registration fee. Both outfits run free coaching sessions and have numerous lifeguards to pull you out if things go horribly wrong. The Watersports Centre has proper hot showers and changing rooms and the added bonus of Salford’s famous blue cranes as a sight-point down one end. Uswim has a more improvisational shower and changing tents with plastic garden chairs and wonky slogans such as “How great are you?”, but offers hot tea, sports massages and cinnamon rolls and a longer 750m circuit which passes under a red-and-white iron footbridge. Swimming under the bridge is my favourite bit – I like to imagine I’m an aquatic troll, asking “Who’s that trip-trapping over my bridge?” as I glide underneath.
Despite the impressive organisation, I was little sceptical at first. For all of the hundreds of millions poured in to redeveloping Salford’s waters, I couldn’t help thinking of the grubby old Ship Canal nearby and all the nastiness that may be festering at the bottom of the six-metre deep docks. Yet when I first jumped in from the pontoon and swallowed a bit of the water after my mouth formed an involuntary “o” (it was only 14C – this was before the heatwave kicked in) I was pleasantly surprised to taste nothing at all.
“Tell your workmates you’re going to swim in Salford Quays and they think you’re going to melt or something,” says Dave Quartermain, cheery head swim coach for the enormous Manchester Triathlon Club, who set up Uswim in 2009 and hires his dock from the owners, Peel Holdings. “But it is clean and safe, I promise. You would not believe the effort that goes in to keeping these waters safe – it’s like Evian in there.”
The water quality in both swimming docks is carefully monitored by aquatic science company Apem, which regularly tests its microbiological makeup for waterborn horrors such as Weil’s disease. To prevent stagnation, the water is circulated via a very expensive aeration system. It seems to work. I had a dip in the distinctly opaque mixed pond at Hampstead Heath on a trip to London the other week and it was rather dirty compared with Salford’s clear waters.
Swimming in the Quays really started gaining in popularity in 2002 when they hosted the triathlon at Manchester’s Commonwealth Games. But it’s only in the past five years that the concept has really taken off. This year has been a bumper one for open-water swimming in Salford. Four thousand people have paid to become members of Uswim (you have to register to swim for insurance reasons). I was one of 274 swimmers in Dock 9 on Wednesday and the water has never been warmer at a tropical 22.5C.
Incidentally, Uswim doesn’t enforce a wetsuit policy – even in the winter months when they run “polar” sessions on the first Saturday of every month. According to Quartermain, the swimmers in winter are a hardy lot – “Your wussy wetsuit-wearing triathletes only tend to swim in summer,” he says. At the Watersports Centre they’ll only let you in wearing a cossie if it’s over 14C.
The docks attract all sorts. Keri-Anne Payne, two-time world 10km open water champion, used to train with Uswim in the runup to big events, and numerous Channel-swimming veterans are among the members. On Wednesday there were Iron Men and Women in training, as well as a group of local kids and a woman in a wheelchair. Almost everyone was faster than me, but no matter. I could just turn on to my back when I got tired and look up at the sky again.
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