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Broomhill Pool was one of the first wave of Modernist architecture in Britain. Modernist, as in cleanlined, light-filled buildings whose structures and surfaces were stripped down to the essentials, typically with smooth white stucco surfaces, steel windows, and crisply minimal design details.

Modernist design was a bold architectural response to social change, the vast death-toll in the 1914-18 war, and the more than twenty million people who died in the 1918-19 flu pandemic. Modernist architecture introduced the idea that buildings could be healthy, hygienic, and egalitarian.

Broomhill Pool was in illustrious architectural company. Three years before it opened, the De La Warr Pavilion appeared at Bexhill, arguably the finest example of so-called Streamline Moderne architecture in Britain. From that time, more than fifty Modernist lidos sprang up across Britain.

As Janet Smith wrote in her definitive book Liquid Assets, “Broomhill may lack the national profile of the Modernist lidos at Saltdean, Tinside or Penzance but it is arguably their equal in architectural significance”.

January 2021 aerial drone footage of Broomhill Pool
Credit: DJI MINI 2 – Broom Hill Swimming Pool Ipswich 4K

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