As conservation group Twentieth Century Society launches a campaign to save the UK's under-threat leisure centres, we look at 10 of the country's most architecturally significant facilities.
The Twentieth Century Society has launched a campaign to list 10 leisure centres in the UK as the facilities, many of which were built in the 1970s and 80s, are increasingly under threat of closure and demolition.
"The boom era for leisure centres was really in the 1970s, when publically funded facilities were in abundance," explained Twentieth Century Society campaigns manager Oli Marshall.
"The decimation of local authority budgets in recent years has already forced many to close, with the challenges of the past few years only heightening the threat they now face." "The Covid pandemic, global chlorine shortages and the cost-of-energy crisis have meant that every pool is now at risk," he told Dezeen. "If we don't move to protect the most historically important examples now, they may soon disappear altogether."
"Some of the most architecturally innovative structures of the late twentieth century"
According to Marshall, the UK's leisure centres represent some of the most varied and innovative architecture built in the 1970s and 80s.
"Space-age geodesic domes, glazed pyramids, castellated forts, brutalist elephants, Moorish postmodern palaces ? is there any other building type that's as wildly varied and downright eccentric"&quo...