Swimmingpod

Tom Kearney is a Hampstead resident of over a quarter of a century and year-round swimmer at the nearby Ponds. He has a life well lived. In this podcast we talk about that life and the very special place that swimming in open water has in it. The late Al Alvarez, poet and author of the book ‘Pond Life’, Tom’s friend in Hampstead, brought him to swimming at The Ponds, something that he says has sav...

This podcast is about open water swimming in London – given how urban this global city is, it is not immediately obvious that this is a great place for open water swimming. Indeed, there is a thriving open water swimming scene. More accurately, there are several open water swimming scenes in London - in rivers (usually the River Thames), lakes, ponds, and outdoor pools. Here are four personal acco...

Sarah Giles lives and swims in open water in Oxford. She is Programme Development Manager at SportExcel UK, a sports organisation working with people with learning disability across the UK in performance/elite sport. She is a passionate open water swimmer all days and all seasons, and a powerful advocate for equality and inclusion. In this podcast we talk about open water swimming in Oxford, and h...

There is a strong tradition of outdoor swimming in Oxford. Writer Iris Murdoch said something like this “On hot days in the Oxford summer my husband and I manage to slip into the Thames, a mile or two above the city. The art is to draw no attention to oneself, but to cruise quietly by the reeds like a water rat". A recent exhibition in Oxford showed a map of bathing places in or close to the city...

Darrin Roles started the Lock to Lock a single swim event in the Thames in 2015, and it has grown into a series of events and distances. The first year the event was from Eynsham to King’s Lock (4 kilometers), and in subsequent years, swims from Farmoor to King’s Lock (6 kilometers) and from Farmoor to Godstow Lock (10 kilometers) were introduced. This Wild Swim series is known for being set in lo...

This podcast is about my practice of swimming to work, the last of which took place in 2022 when I retired. A swim to work for me was 8 kilometers, from Eynsham Lock to Port Meadow, Oxford. My final swim to work was on a Friday, when I had been accompanied by several friends, to make it a memorable one. While previous swims to work had started early in the so that I could get to work on time – my...

Jeremy Wellingham and Mike Harris are both open water swimmers, Jeremy in Oxfordshire, Mike in London. Both swim nationally and internationally too. Both write swim-inspired haiku. In this podcast they talk about their swimming experiences, and what it takes to write this Japanese short-form poetry. Water features widely, and thinking poetically shapes their awareness of the environment as they sw...

This podcast is about swims in The Shire - Tolkein’s Oxfordshire. I have no idea if Tolkien was a swimmer, but there is plenty of evidence to suggest that he liked water. In Lord of the Rings, The Elves have close affinity to water; while Ulmo is the Lord of Water. Ulmo is also the enemy of evil creatures, and therefore water is associated with moral force.  The Shire is a place where hobbits live...

Emma Gibbard and Carl Tysom are both passionate about open water swimming, and both have been involved in overseeing swimming at the West Oxfordshire Sailing Club, where there is a lake with a one kilometer track, and dedicated members who swim on a regular basis, many of them through winter, alongside a thriving sailing community. I am also involved in overseeing swimming here. In this podcast we...

Five years ago, Stanley Ulijaszek undertook 65 swims in different places at the age of 65 years. The book 'Memories Like Water’ is a personal account of these swims. A lot of things happened in that year. Going to swim in places known, in places new. Lakes, rivers, oceans. Revisiting places and the memories that have gone with them, revisiting the memories of those places and reinventing them....

Helen Edwards is an ecological artist, dancer, and swimmer. I am with her at her solo exhibition at Oxford’s North Wall Arts Centre, entitled Breathing of Life.  She has danced and swum in natural landscapes all her life. Connecting body, breath and imagination, she makes aesthetic connections with environmental images – in paintings juxtaposed with underwater photography, and film. In her work sh...

Swimming outdoors every day, Stanley Ulijaszek celebrated his 70th birthday recently, obviously with a swim and a song, a picnic and cake. Will his guests still swim at 70? This what they said, in turn: Gemma Ferrier, Jeremy Wellingham, Lizanne Christopher, Blan Walker, Lisa Keeping, Jess Harrold, Steve Banner, Sarah Dilger, Alana Smith, Julie Macken, Kristie Waller, Louisa Maybury, Kath Fothering...

Sam Millward is a scuba and freediving instructor, fascinated by the mental, physical and experiential benefits that all forms of immersion can give. In this podcast he describes the different world that free diving is a gateway to. He also describes deep diving, with equipment, and the physiology that goes with it - what your body needs to be able to do. Breathing, breath holding and breath work...

Level water means equal rights. In the case of Ian Thwaites and the charity Level Water, this is right to water, which swimming is a gateway to. He set up this charity with the mission of giving children with disabilities the opportunity to learn to swim, and by extension, empowers them to take part in a range of water-based activities that swimming opens the gate to. From physical development to...

Ramin Cyrus has swum a channel relay, the Thames Marathon at Henley and other big swims, all great achievements. Powerful achievements, given that he is visually impaired. While for most open water swimmers, sighting is a matter of looking up, to work out where they are and to set their course, Ramin Cyrus sights without sight, with the help of great friends in the water, Paul Daniels and Anthony...

Vera Prokopieva and Annie Liddle were undergraduate students at the University of Oxford. They both took up wild swimming together while at Oxford. Annie grew up on a farm in Hampshire while Vera grew up in Bulgaria. Both had a love of swimming before coming to Oxford, and both have taken their love of swimming with them. In this podcast we discuss the value that open water and winter swimming bri...

Paul Atherton is a filmmaker and Londoner. He produced and directed The Ballet of Change , four short films that were projected onto London landmarks, most famously Piccadilly Circus in 2007. His video-diary  Our London Lives  is in the permanent collection of the Museum of London. He took up outdoor swimming at the Serpentine Swimming Club, London, in the Summer of 2023, barely being able to swim...

Karen Throsby is a swimmer and a sociologist. She is passionate about marathon swimming, and her CV of international distance swims is truly outstanding, taking in the Catalina Channel and Twenty Bridges Swim around Manhatten, as well as the English Channel. In 2008, as she started training for her English Channel solo swim, she took this as a unique opportunity to bring together her combined rese...

Access is an important issue everywhere. People of all creeds and backgrounds swim. Georgie Milner is a life-long swimmer and is very keen to improve the inclusivity of sport settings. She graduated in Human Sciences from the University of Oxford in 2022, where she completed her dissertation on the intersection of swimming and social exclusion, alongside working on the Oxford University Sports Cou...

Francesca Forno, of Trento University, Italy, gives a presentation entitled 'From grassroots to platform: The reconfiguration of alternative food provisioning in the online world'

The gorgeous rivers of England are sick, and I am sick too. Of the politics, of the discharges into the rivers. Of the effluent, both real and that spoken by the politicians currently in charge of this usually green and pleasant land. A land also full of streams and rivers, veins and arteries of blue space, often blue but also often coloured by raw sewage. The personal is political, and that goes...

In May 2022, the Serpentine Swimming Club was inducted into the International Marathon Swimmers Hall of Fame (IMSHOF), in Naples, Italy. One Saturday morning following this proud moment, many of  the club’s marathon swimmers came together to be photographed by Anthony Wood, a fellow Serpentine Club Swimmer who’s been photographing life at the club for the past few years, as documented in his...

So many cold water swimmers are non-conformists, but who would have thought of it as a political act? Grace Wright-Arora carried out social research on cold water swimming for her undergraduate dissertation at the University of Bristol. She interviewed outdoor swimmers in London and near Bristol, and found that for many, swimming was a way of resisting norms and structures that confine them in eve...

It is winter, and there are many winter swimming briefings out there – this is a good thing, people are aware of winter swimming safety. This podcast is a raw recording of the briefing given and embellished by Stanley Ulijaszek and prepared by Jeremy Wellingham, at the annual winter swimming event at Oxford's Port Meadow, the Dodo Swim. It takes the swimmer or dipper through a chronological sequen...

Swimming in moonlight is one of life’s un-buyable treasures. There are twelve full moon opportunities a year, and although the clouds or the rain can sometime put a spoiler on things, you can come away having experienced at the very least a change in routine, and more often than not, a sense of wonder of the world. All it takes is a full moon and some open water to swim in, and of course some frie...