The Crewe Municipal Swimming Baths opened to public fanfare in November 1937 and was the source of great civic pride for generations of townspeople. 85 years on in November 2022, the only water in the pools had leaked through the roof, the windows were boarded up, and the glory days seemed distant. A local charity had a grand vision to breathe new life into it, securing £4m Town Deal funding to transform it into a flagship community centre and events space within a vibrant mixed-use landscape. As we walked around the huge echoey building on our first site visit, there was faded glamour, failing building fabric and graffiti at every turn.
The baths at Flag Lane were closed by Crewe Town Council in 2016 following the opening of a new build replacement facility in the town. The building was left without a purpose and suffered from neglect and vandalism. In late 2022 K2 began work on realising a local charity’s vision to extend and transform the building into a community hub. The project was developed to tender stage but was stopped due to insufficient funding.
The centrepiece of the client’s plan was for the main bath hall to be converted into a community hall; a sunken multi-use auditorium, its floor raking to match the increasing depth of the former pool. Their desire to retain, adapt and preserve original features (in accordance with conditions of the Listed Building consent) was laudable but this proposal presented obvious challenges when considered alongside their other requirement to provide full accessibility.
Alongside new staircases, a platform lift was proposed to provide access down from the pool surround into the pool, but it quickly became apparent when auditing the design we inherited that this would not comply with Building Regulations relating to means of escape in the event of an emergency.
A CGI (computer-generated image) can give an impression of an achievable reality, the medium suggesting a degree of design resolution. Enthusiastic clients often clamour for such a realistic visual and see it as a necessity for giving credibility to an idea for stakeholder engagement, publicity or fundraising. Architects often oblige, keen to please their client and provide the material to communicate the clients’ vision and demonstrate their capabilities.
The circumstances and caveats that should accompany such an early image, such as ‘work in progress’, or ‘subject to survey’ are easy to overlook and often forgotten when what is depicted in the image begins to unravel.
K2 worked as part of a team brought on to try to make the project deliverable, addressing technical compliance, undertaking further surveys to verify previous assumptions, and developing the fundamental engineering strategies that had to date not been adequately considered. We felt some guilt in picking apart the image, not in terms of quality of rendering or realism, but presenting to the client the insurmountable regulatory and operational barriers that made it unachievable.
There was a well-intentioned naivety to the image that in retrospect was symptomatic of the project as a whole- an eager but inexperienced client blinkered to the scale of the challenge they had set themselves. The sunken pool auditorium concept was retained but modified to address various other technical issues. Access for wheelchair users was not possible without the insertion of unwieldy ramps, so the clients’ goal of full accessibility was not achieved.
Sadly, the process uncovered an unbridgeable funding gap, exacerbated by the soaring inflation of 2022. Despite the teams’ best efforts to demonstrate value engineering options, the client was unwilling to scale back their ambitions, feeling that what was deliverable for their budget would not achieve enough of the facilities they had sold to their stakeholders, and to which the funding was allocated.
When considering projects such as this, there is a delicate balance to be struck between tempering ambition with the comparable mundanity of reality. Too much reality at an earlier stage would have stopped the scheme before it reached us; too much ambition only delayed the inevitable.
