Fill her up! Renovated village pool at Metheringham ready for grand re-opening

BBC Radio Lincolnshire presenter Sean Dunderdale did the honours of turning on the hose to refill Metheringham Swimming Pool last Tuesday allowing it to steadily fill up, ready for re-opening on Saturday and a grand celebration on Bank Holiday Monday.

Karen Rymer is pool committee secretary and part of the four-strong management team. She said: “Someone asked, ‘can’t you get the fire brigade to fill it up?’ But it is a slow process, we have to do it gently. If you do it too quickly the newly grouted tiles would just come off the special adhesive.”

Refurbishment work was completed on August 1 and then left for the lining to dry, although they held a small ribbon cutting ceremony to mark the completion.

The pool first came into being in 1974 when villagers decided they wanted somewhere to learn to swim. It was built next to the primary school on land granted by the parish council. A gang of villagers dug the hole by hand with shovels.

Karen said: “It has been run as a community pool in partnership with the county council, but was then passed to various committees without any serious structural work done to it in 47 years.”

After it faced closure when the old committee feared it was too expensive to save, new volunteers came on board and it became a charity in 2019 chaired by Melanie Wright. Karen joined too, her husband does the website and their son does odd jobs. RAF Wing Commander Nicola Duncan has also come on board as a trustee and trained lifeguard and they have a committee of seven.

With the pool lining disintegrating and the filtration system leaking, they successfully applied for £36,000 in funding from the FCC Community Fund – from landfill tax.

Karen recalled: “Then Covid hit. We put it back until January 2022 and all the pipework was dug up and we found it was far worse, meaning we had to use our contingency money up.”

After more delays, they began chipping off the old tiles in April, but found a crack in the pool lining.

"We appealed on Facebook for £5,000, but with donations and grants we ended up with |£11,000, meaning we were able to fix the crack, covering it with special mosaic tiles and replace all the old concrete slabs with resin right around the pool,” Karen said.

The project was completed by Jonathan Hamilton and his Lincolnshire building company Struere UK, including attaching more than 5,000 new tiles.

“The groundswell of support has been amazing,” said Karen. “We were in tears when the water went in.

“We are all volunteers with other jobs. Now we are getting stuck into the normal pre-season stuff and we have revamped the website to take online bookings.”

They would normally close at the end of August due to the cost of heating the pool in cooler weather, but Heath Farm Energy have provided a £2,500 grant to heat the pool throughout September.

The pool opens from 7am until 10pm thanks to new lighting and offers private bookings, parent and toddler, fitness sessions and general swims.

Visit: megpool.org.uk