York Guides

I drove past the ruins of what used to be Barbican Baths today, the pyramid-topped swimming pool built in the late 1970s before the Barbican Centre was built next to it in the late 1980s.

It's very odd for me to see such a thing, to have lived long enough to see a building when it was new, and when it was demolished. I guess it's a sign that I'm getting old.

Barbican Baths to me has always been a sort of iconic symbol in my life, even if at times I never thought about it much. When it was brand new our school, Fulford Church of England Primary on Heslington Lane (also demolished, but rebuilt), used to take us there for swimming lessons. One Length, Bronze, Silver and Gold Swimming Certificates were all earned there... I don't think I managed the Life Savers' Badge?

I must have been there hundreds of time, all through my youth and teenage years and even into adulthood for exercise - some pretty amazing memories that I guess a lot of people from this side of town have.

It's difficult to recapture, to remember how cool the new Barbican Baths looked when I was less than ten years old. It was around the same time that we were going to see Star Wars at the ABC (destroyed long ago); it fitted in with our perception of a high tech world, our new world of the future with smoked glass and spaceship-style architecture.

The building itself was as much a fascination and source of enjoyment as was going inside for a swim. I remember one evening when my mother took my brother and I there in the car, along with my best friend at the time, Sean Easton, and dropped us off at the back then drove away. When we got to the door it was closed, something my mother would have known if she'd read the timetable, but she never was any good at that sort of thing, still isn't in fact. But the truth is we didn't care, the outside of the building was just as much a source of fun to young kids as the inside. It was all mysterious slopes and angles to climb on. You could run all the way around it, or have a pretend base on top of the mini pyramid at the back's flat top. Even the usually prosaic Sean Easton didn't mope around complaining about how stupid my mother was after a while, we had a great time.

The Barbican Baths building was always a place we would visit from time to time, like a subconscious Mecca it would attract us - unlike the actual Mecca (bingo) around the corner, which was an efficient repellent. In the early 80s, as teenagers, we were all riding BMXs, which have mysteriously never really gone out of fashion, and the Barbican Baths with its sloped sides was perfect for trying little tricks out on, and showing off to any girls that might have been watching.

At school, at about fifteen, I couldn't believe it when Jenny Craven agreed to go out on a date with me, swimming at the Barbican - then how embarrassed I was that my swimming trunks got ripped while we were in the pool.

In my early twenties I went swimming there with my first wife to be, Maja Obradovic, after we'd been on the climbing wall in the new complex next door, this was also the first time in my life I swam forty lengths, 1km... then in my early thirties I went swimming there to get away from the memory of my second wife, Masayo Iizuka; hoping to get fitter and meet a third, which I did, but somewhere else.

It's only now as I've sat down to write this that I realise how many significant memories were attached to Barbican Baths, which is probably why I felt compelled to go back and take some last memory pictures before it's swept away to make room for a new building.