Ask most people where they would go for swimming lessons near them, and you get a pause, then a guess, then a phone number that turns out to belong to a pool that stopped running its learn-to-swim programme two years ago. It is not that the information does not exist. It is that nobody has gathered it in one place and told the truth about it, including the awkward parts.
Which pools have closed. Which ones are about to be dug up. What a term genuinely costs. Where you will simply not find water within a reasonable drive. This guide does that job for the four places Everyone Swims works: Cheltenham, Gloucester, the Forest of Dean and Cardiff. It sets out what provision actually exists in each one, what it costs, what has changed recently, and how to get a place when there are more people wanting lessons than there is water to teach them in.
Where we could not verify something, we say so rather than filling the gap with something that sounds right. Read it once and you will know more about swimming provision in your area than most people who work in it. That is not a boast. It is a comment on how scattered this information has been until now.
Sources: Sport England Active Lives Children and Young People Survey via Swim England (Year 7 proficiency); Swim England and ukactive, June 2025 (pool losses); Swim Wales with Cardiff Metropolitan University, 2024 (Cardiff); National Water Safety Forum WAID summary, May 2026 (fatalities).
Before you look at any individual pool, it helps to understand the pressure every one of them is under. Swim England and ukactive published joint analysis in June 2025 showing that 500 publicly accessible swimming pools have been lost in England since 2010, taking 34,859 square metres of water space with them. The striking part is the timing. Roughly three quarters of all that lost water space disappeared in the five years after 2020, and seven of the ten local authorities that shed the most water space have deprivation levels above the national average. Pools are not vanishing evenly. They are vanishing fastest where the alternatives are thinnest.
The consequence shows up in children. Sport England's Active Lives Children and Young People Survey found that 30 per cent of Year 7 pupils in 2023/24 could not swim 25 metres competently, confidently and proficiently. Across all school years from 1 to 11, only 60 per cent of children can swim 25 metres unaided, which works out at around 368,000 fewer children than the same measure produced in 2017/18. A generation is going backwards on a life skill the national curriculum has required for decades.
Wales tells a sharper version of the same story, and Cardiff sits at the bottom of it. We come to that further down. What matters for now is the practical translation: fewer pools, longer lists, fuller classes, and far less room to change your mind once you have chosen. Planning ahead has stopped being an optional nicety.
Cheltenham is the best served of our four areas, which is a relative statement rather than a comfortable one.
Leisure at Cheltenham on Tommy Taylors Lane is the town's main indoor provision, run by The Cheltenham Trust for the borough council. It holds a 33 metre main pool with up to six lanes, a separate 23.8 metre teaching pool kept warmer at around 30.5 degrees, and a diving pool. Its learn-to-swim programme follows the Swim England pathway and runs 50 weeks of the year, taking children from a few months old through to Stage 7, with adult beginner and intermediate courses alongside. Published prices put children's lessons at £35.50 a month, and a ten-week adult course between £68 and £126 depending on level.
It is also a useful case study in how fragile this provision is. In January 2024 the teaching pool and splash pad closed after structural engineers found reinforced autoclaved aerated concrete in the building. They stayed shut until 15 April. Three months with no warm teaching water in the town's principal pool is the kind of thing that quietly removes a whole term from a child's progress.
Cheltenham Lido, which most people still call Sandford Parks Lido and which was formally rebranded for the 2025 season, is the other significant option. It is a 50 metre outdoor pool run by a charitable trust, drawing more than 200,000 visits a year, and it runs 12-week term-time courses and holiday crash courses for ages four and up, plus one-to-one lessons. Its Community Swim Programme lets a business or individual sponsor eight one-to-one lessons for a disadvantaged child over the summer for £100, which is one of the more direct pieces of subsidy anywhere in the county.
Everyone Swims runs its Cheltenham sessions at Dean Close School and Everlast Gym Cheltenham, covering women-only swimming, women-only aqua aerobics, children's lessons, our swim squad for ages 10 to 16, and men's water confidence and fitness. If you are weighing up a provider rather than a pool, our guide to the six decisions that actually matter when choosing swimming lessons works through that separately.
Gloucester's picture is dominated by one building and one date.
GL1 Leisure Centre on Bruton Way is the city's main public pool complex, now operated by Freedom Leisure for Gloucester City Council. It teaches children from three months old with no upper age limit and runs adult beginner and stroke improvement classes on the Swim England pathway.
Two things about GL1 are worth knowing before you commit to a term. The first is history. In September 2023 it closed with almost no notice when its previous operator, Aspire Sports Trust, went into liquidation. More than 150 jobs went, and Gloucester City Swimming Club, on that site since 1910, was displaced. Freedom Leisure took over and reopened the facilities on a phased basis within weeks, rehiring around 80 of the former staff. It recovered, but the disruption was real, and it landed on families with no warning.
The second is imminent. Gloucester City Council has committed £8 million to refurbishing GL1 and the neighbouring Oxstalls Sports Park, with construction starting in September 2026 and completion expected in autumn 2027. The published plans cover a new gym, enhanced soft play, new water play features, an upgraded reception and refurbished changing rooms. What they do not state clearly is whether the swimming pool itself closes at any point during the works or for how long. If you are booking a course that runs through this winter, that is the single question worth asking before you pay.
Everyone Swims runs its Gloucester sessions at Everlast Fitness Gloucester and Sir Thomas Rich's School. Working out of school and gym pools rather than a single municipal site is deliberate. It spreads the risk, keeps class sizes small, and means a refurbishment programme at one venue does not take a whole city's community swimming with it.
The Forest of Dean is where the water runs genuinely short, and it is worth being specific rather than vague about why.
The district has three leisure centre pools, all operated by Freedom Leisure for the district council. Cinderford has a 25-metre pool and hosts the Forest of Dean Swimming Club. Lydney has a 25 metre pool and hosts the same club. Newent has a pool, though its published dimensions were not available at the time of writing.
Then the gaps. Freedom Leisure Sedbury has no swimming pool. And at the Five Acres site in Coleford, the largest town in the western Forest, there is currently no pool at all. The district council is building a phased sports and community hub there worth around £9 million, but a swimming pool was excluded from the first phase and only pencilled in as a possible later addition, dependent on finding an outside partner to help fund and run it.
"Pools are loss leaders according to Sport England. You are constantly subsidising a pool."
Councillor Paul Hiett, Forest of Dean District Council, on why a pool was left out of the first phase at Five Acres
Provision also narrowed in 2025. From 1 September that year, Newent Leisure Centre moved its weekday public access from 8:30am to 3:30pm across to 3:30pm to 9:30pm, because the centre sits on a school site and the change was made for pupil safeguarding under Martyn's Law. Curriculum school swimming was unaffected, but weekday daytime public and parent-and-toddler access was not. For anyone who cannot swim in the evening, that is a real reduction rather than a technicality.
There is one much-loved alternative. Bathurst Pool in Lydney is an independent, seasonal, unheated open-air pool run by a charitable trust, entirely outside the Freedom Leisure network. Admission has been £4 for adults and £2.50 for children, cash only, no pre-booking, opening around noon to 5 pm in season. Water temperature on its 2024 opening day was 10 degrees. Its swim club has around 350 registered members and sold out within a fortnight of opening. It is a wonderful thing, and it is not a substitute for a heated teaching pool in December.
Everyone Swims runs its Forest of Dean sessions at Etloe House Farms in Blakeney precisely because the district's own provision leaves so much of it uncovered.
Cardiff has more pools than anywhere else in this guide and, on the available evidence, the lowest childhood swimming ability in Wales.
Research by Swim Wales with Cardiff Metropolitan University, reported in May 2024, found that only 16 per cent of children in Cardiff can swim, against a Welsh average of 41 per cent. It also found that only 57 per cent of Cardiff primary schools sent pupils to swimming lessons in the 2022/23 academic year, among the lowest school participation rates in the country. In a capital city ringed by rivers, a bay and reservoirs, that is not a statistic anyone can file away comfortably.
Things are moving. Cardiff Council's AquaClusters pilot launched in September 2024 at Eastern Leisure Centre, Cardiff Met's Cyncoed campus and Cardiff International Pool. By June 2025 primary school engagement had risen from 57 per cent to 74 per cent, with more than 2,250 children expected to have accessed lessons by the end of that academic year. Separately, the Welsh Government's Nofio Ysgol national school swimming and water safety programme starts rolling out in September 2026, guaranteeing at least 20 lessons for pupils in Years 4 and 5, beginning in up to nine local authorities and reaching full national coverage by 2028/29, with £2 million committed this financial year for barriers such as transport.
Transport is the barrier Cardiff's own decision-makers name first. Council reporting in June 2025 identified the cost of getting children to the pool, rather than pool capacity, as the biggest single obstacle to school swimming in the city.
On facilities, Cardiff International Pool in the Bay is the flagship: a 50-metre, ten-lane main pool with a movable floor, opened in 2008, plus a 25-metre leisure pool. Centres at Eastern, Western, Llanishen, Fairwater, Maindy and the STAR Hub all have pools and run lessons, with Eastern, Western, Fairwater and the STAR Hub each holding a 25-metre main tank. Pentwyn Leisure Centre's pool reopened on 27 July 2026 after being closed since the first lockdown in March 2020, more than five years out of service. Free swimming sessions for under-16s and over-60s continue at better-run Cardiff pools at specified times, a survivor of the Welsh Government's national free swimming initiative even after its funding was halved in 2019.
Everyone Swims runs its Cardiff sessions at Everlast Gym Cardiff.
Children's lessons, adult beginners, women-only swimming and aqua aerobics, men's water confidence and our swim squad for ages 10 to 16, across Cheltenham, Gloucester, the Forest of Dean and Cardiff.
Book a class in our locations Support the movementPrices are less standardised than people expect, and the published ones are only part of the story. Here is what we could verify, with sources named, as at August 2026.
We could not obtain published lesson prices for GL1 in Gloucester, for the Freedom Leisure pools at Cinderford, Lydney or Newent, or for Cheltenham Lido's term-time courses, which sit behind a separate booking platform. Rather than estimate them, we have left them blank. Phone and ask, and treat any comparison site quoting a confident figure for those venues with suspicion.
Two figures put the price question in perspective. A survey of parents of children aged 4 to 16, commissioned by a swimwear brand rather than a governing body, found 19 per cent said they could not afford private swimming lessons and 51 per cent would struggle to pay for school swimming lessons if they were not subsidised. Set that against Swim England's finding that swimming prevented around 78,500 cases of ill health in England in a single year and generates roughly £2.4 billion in annual social value, and the arithmetic of pricing people out looks poor for everyone, not only for the families concerned.
Practical advice, drawn from how the market in these four areas actually behaves rather than from how it is supposed to.
Phone, do not email. Cancellations get filled by whoever is on the line when they happen. Online forms are processed in batches, sometimes weekly, by which point the space has gone.
Ask specifically about mid-term starts. Providers running rolling 50-week programmes, as Leisure at Cheltenham does, release places continuously rather than only in September. A term boundary is not always a barrier.
Look outside the school-run window. Weekday slots between 4pm and 6pm are the most contested hours of the week. Early mornings, later evenings and Sunday afternoons are often available when the after-school block is full.
Use holiday crash courses to jump the queue. Intensive courses over half term or in August cover ground quickly and frequently have space when weekly terms do not. They are also a reasonable way to test a provider before committing to a year of it.
Book the venue, not the brand. A provider running four sites may have a six month wait at one and immediate availability twenty minutes away. Ask about every venue they operate, not only the nearest one to you.
Ask what happens when the pool closes. After Cheltenham's structural closure and Gloucester's operator collapse, this is a fair question rather than a rude one. Does your place transfer, does the term extend, do you get a refund? Get the answer before you pay, not after.
Join more than one list. They cost nothing to sit on and you can always decline. Given the numbers on pool closures, redundancy is sensible planning rather than pessimism.
Both regions are shaped by water, which is a pleasure and a hazard in roughly equal measure.
The National Water Safety Forum recorded 202 accidental water-related fatalities across the UK in 2025, with a further 201 cases of undetermined cause still under review. Fifty-seven per cent happened at inland locations: rivers, canals, lakes, reservoirs and quarries. Eighty-five per cent of those who died were male. The detail that should change how everyone thinks about this is that 32 per cent were doing everyday things such as walking or running, meaning they had no intention of entering the water at all.
Locally, the rules are clearer than most people realise.
The single most useful skill for any of this is floating on your back. If you go into cold water unexpectedly, resisting the urge to thrash and floating until the cold water shock passes buys you the sixty to ninety seconds that decide most outcomes. It is one of the first things taught in a good beginner class, and it is the reason water confidence matters more than stroke technique.
Averages hide the part that matters most. Swim England's England Swims research found that 14 per cent of White adults cannot swim 25 metres unaided, against 49 per cent of adults from ethnically diverse communities. In the same research, 97 per cent of respondents from those communities said swimming is an important skill to have, and 90 per cent wanted their children to learn, but only 59 per cent regarded it as accessible. The desire is not the problem. Access is.
Swim England reached the same conclusion about its own sport. Its Diversity and Inclusion Action Plan, published in March 2025, sets out that ethnically diverse communities, disabled people and people on lower incomes are all significantly under-represented in swimming compared with their share of the population, and commits the organisation to closing that gap. Sport England's participation data points the same way: 11.1 per cent of White British people take part in swimming, a higher proportion than South Asian, Black, Chinese and other ethnic groups.
Now layer that on top of the pool closure finding from earlier in this guide, that seven of the ten local authorities losing the most water space have above-average deprivation. The communities least likely to be swimming are also the ones losing pools fastest. That is not a coincidence, and it will not correct itself.
This is the whole reason Everyone Swims was set up. Water for everyone, no exceptions, and a goal of getting one million people into water. In practice that means women-only swimming and women-only aqua aerobics for anyone for whom a mixed pool is a closed door, men's water confidence and fitness for the group most likely to drown and least likely to book a lesson, children's lessons for families the school system has not reached, and a swim squad for ages 10 to 16 for young people ready to go further. If you want the health case in detail, our piece on swimming and women's health sets it out.
Whatever your age and whatever your starting point, our classes across Cheltenham, Gloucester, the Forest of Dean and Cardiff are built for people the pool has too often overlooked.
Book a class in our locations Make a donationSwimming is one of the few skills that is both a pleasure and a piece of safety equipment. Wherever you are across Cheltenham, Gloucester, the Forest of Dean or Cardiff, there is water within reach and a way into it, and the only wrong move is waiting another year to find out where.