28th January 2023
A quick overview of the Oasis’ media coverage through January 2023 – which has been quite considerable. But this post highlights on three important pieces published in various media this month.
On the 15th January, the BBC website published this piece.
Read more of our blog here: https://saveoasisswindon.co.uk/news/
On Tuesday 17th January the Liberal England Blogspot posted this: If we want better public health we must defend local sports facilities. An extract follows:
In a recent The Rest is Politics podcast, Alastair Campbell talked about the way many countries see sport as responsibility of the health ministry. In Britain, however, it’s lumped in with culture. There it’s seen one of those things that are nice to have but where government spending when can be cut when times are hard.
John Harris has an article in the Guardian today looking at the results of this mistaken policy:
‘Clearly, this is a country that needs to get better at looking after itself. But while glaring facts about the intersection of poverty and ill health are serially ignored, public health is also hindered and damaged by a dismal failure to join up one area of policy with another.
f you want particularly vivid proof of that very British syndrome, try this: as hospitals break and buckle, local leisure centres and swimming pools are also in the midst of crisis….’
The Economist
Then on the 26th January 2023, this piece appeared in The Economist: Britain is beginning to protect its 1970s leisure centre.
“You need to use your imagination,” says Otto Saumarez Smith, an architectural historian. The Oasis swimming pool and leisure centre in Swindon closed in 2020 and is now drawing graffiti taggers and weeds. But when it opened, in 1976, it was a steamy tropical paradise with trees and slides under a bravura 45m-wide glazed dome.
In 2021 the Oasis became the first leisure centre to be protected by Historic England, which noted the odd fact that a rock band from Manchester, more than 200km (124 miles) north, is named after it. A second 1970s leisure centre, in Bradford, was protected last year. The Twentieth Century Society, an architectural-heritage charity, is campaigning to save ten other structures, including the dome in Britain’s first Center Parcs resort. It says that several are being assessed.’
The society hopes to repeat the success of a campaign that began in 1991 to save open-air swimming pools known as lidos. Both types of building involve water, but are otherwise entirely different. With their cold water, uncomfortable changing rooms and art-deco styling, lidos preach the virtues of exercise. The indoor leisure centres of the 1970s and 1980s were about family and fun.
Visit the Save the Oasis Facebook page to read the rest of it.