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timeforabathblog · 4 years ago

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3. Plans for Chubb Place, 1930s

Earlier this year I was in touch with David Juler from the Museum of Oxford about some beautifully hand-painted plans held in the city council archives for a bathing place that was never built: Chubb Place.

I provided the following statement for the City Stories section of the MO’s website:

There was bathing in this area of the river, and even a built bathing place that leaves some remains today in the form of steps running into the water.

The Sunnymead and Cutteslowe Park Management Plan for 2018-2022 (available online) provides some insight into the area's history:

'Oxford City Council acquired Cutteslowe Park between 1936 and 1938. Sixty one acres were purchased in 1936, seven acres added in 1937, and a further six acres purchased from the Dean and Chaplain of Westminster in 1938. The site was previously a farm and allotments, and the Parks Depot retains many of the original 18th and 19th-century farm buildings, including the rather grand farmhouse...

'Sunnymead Park was once a council tip. After being covered, it was left for a long time as a wasteland area. It started being used as an unofficial motorbike track in the 1980s, triggering a public meeting and the creation of the ‘Cutteslowe/Sunnymead Group’. The group worked with the City Council to clear fly-tipping, create a sports zone, improve wildlife areas and paths and generally transform the site. The old Drovers road or droveway, a route used for driving livestock into Oxford’s markets, is still visible and remnants of an old bathing place can also be seen on the bank of the Cherwell.'

It seems like the Council commissioned the bathing place plans around the time when they acquired the land in the late 1930s (though looking more closely, I can see that one of the plans is dated 1935, so I'm not certain about the order of things here). Perhaps WWII got in the way...

As for the 'old bathing place' mentioned in the park management plan, I don't know when this was installed, though there is mention of 'Chubb's Corner' being used by boys from St Edward's school as early as the 1870s ('Fifty Years Ago', St Edward's School Chronicle, 402 (1925), p. 279), when it is referred to as the site of 'frequent skirmishes with the natives' (presumably referring to fights between St Edward's students and boys from the town).

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I’d also add that the first of these pictures represents one plan (presumably from a different architect / builder) the second and third another – and it’s interesting to note just how different the proposed bathing places would have been.

In the first plan, the area for swimming and bathing is situated in the River Cherwell itself, and the changing cubicles, flowerbeds and lawns in front of them arc majestically around a stretch of river like the seats and walls of an amphitheatre. Even in the approach to the bathing place by land, this arc is anticipated by a line of trees. Rather than being part of the background (as in the second plan) the river here is the centre of attention – everything faces towards it – and even the cubicles themselves individually look inwards onto the enclosed space.

In the second plan, on the other hand, bathers are funnelled according to gender through two rather meanly windowed, institutional-looking buildings before getting out to the two rectilinear pools – one for paddling, the other for swimming – both separated from river nearby.

Two very different visions of what a bathing place should be: one celebrating nature, open to the elements, theatrical and curvilinear; the other more hygienic and utilitarian, reinforcing a sense of difference between nature and civilisation, more concerned, perhaps, with cleanliness and exercise than communal spectacle, pleasure and play.

The difference between these two visions echoes wider cultural changes with regard to public bathing in Britain. Up until the 1930s, argued historian George Ryley Scott in 1939,

public baths presented no features destined to attract the populace in the sense that the ancient Romans and Greeks, and the Japanese, were attracted. They could offer no enticing features such as the thermal springs of Bath or Baden did. There was, in connexion with them, nothing to attract the sense that the sweating baths of seventeenth-century London attracted. On the contrary, these English and continental public baths provided a means for washing the body in the interests of cleanliness or health, or, later, for swimming as exercise. This much granted, their purpose began and ended. They provided no social atmosphere, they were in no sense rendezvous for gossiping or scandal-mongering; they were as far from one's conception of a haunt of pleasure as it was humanly possible to make them. They were drab and dreary. And they stank of officialdom and of patronage.

By contrast, the very word, ‘lido’ – drawn from the famous beach at Venice and popularised in Britain in this period as a term for an outdoor pool – suggested a casting off of the stigma surrounding the Victorian ‘washhouse’ in favour of a popular modernism, a renewal of public space in which pleasure and ‘social atmosphere’, in combination with sunlight and water, were placed front and centre.

Credit to Museum of Oxford for the pictures – more city stories here: https://museumofoxford.omeka.net/

Quote from George Ryley Scott, The Story of Baths and Bathing (London: Werner Laurie, 1939).

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