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| Documentary dips its toe into
ponds drama |
We’ve won a battle but not the war –
that is the message of a documentary about the Hampstead ponds swimming
row, writes Sunita Rappai
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Two ponds photos by Ruth Corney
Margaret Dickinson
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YEARS ago, when the Comic Strip crew – Rik Mayall, Adrian
Edmondson and Jennifer Saunders – were at the height of their
fame, they made a mockumentary imagining a Hollywood version of
the Miners’ Strike. Called The Strike, it “starred”
Al Pacino as Arthur Scargill and Meryl Streep as Mrs Scargill –
with Alexei Sayle as the wretched screenwriter watching helplessly
from the sidelines.
City Swimmers, Margaret Dickinson’s documentary about the battle
to preserve free swimming in Hampstead Heath ponds earlier this
year, is a much more genteel affair. But it is amusing to imagine
a Hollywood version of this particular battle.
I suspect a musical parody along the lines of the Wizard of Oz might
have worked: stalwart campaigners along the Yellow Brick Road to
the ponds, with the Corporation’s chairwoman of the Hampstead
Heath management Catherine McGuinness as the Wicked Witch of the
Heath.
Ms Dickinson’s film, unsurprisingly, is the antithesis of this
kind of Hollywood extravaganza. It is a gentle, quintessentially
English portrait of the Heath’s bathing ponds over its winter
of discontent – a period which began last October when the
head honchos at the Corporation of London announced they could no
longer afford to maintain the ponds and concluded in February –
for the moment, at least – with the introduction of “self-policed”
charging.
The film was originally conceived very differently. Ms Dickinson,
a long-time member of the Kenwood Ladies Pond from Lisburne Road,
is a director and editor by trade who decided to film the ponds
last year to learn more about her new digital camera.
“I set myself this little project,” she says, “that
as I walked across the Heath to swim, I would do some filming. It
would have been a poetic impression of the Heath, a bit disconnected.
But the threat of closure put a much greater urgency on it. I wanted
to do something that was useful for the campaign. So I ended up
getting in all these other professionals to get a team together
so we could do it properly.”
The result, shot over seven months, is an hour-long film that combines
the poetry of the more arty film she had set out to make with more
down-to-earth shots of talking heads and feverish campaign meetings.
So there are long, lyrical shots of the Heath’s ponds intercut
with striking photographs from Ruth Corney and amusing fly-on-the-wall
snippets of life over the changing seasons at the three ponds, as
seen from the point of view of the swimmers.
And then there are the meetings – of the Kenwood Ladies’
Pond Association, the United Swimmers Association, a public meeting
at Hampstead Town Hall in January and a memorable singalong outside
the Corporation’s HQ in February.
Swimmers discuss their attachment to the ponds and their feelings
of betrayal by the Corporation. For more than 100 years, the ponds
had been kept open and free – and the campaigners were determined
they remain that way.
Ms Dickinson, who has swum regularly in the ponds since 1991 –
“ever since my children got old enough” – says she
swims everywhere she can, including the Parliament Hill Lido –
but the ponds have a special charm.
“I suppose everybody says the same thing,” she says. “You
just feel so much better when you are there. It’s both an aesthetic
and a physical thing. There is something about the water in the
early morning and the fact that it is different every day.”
While Ms Dickinson’s film is clearly on the side of the campaigners,
City Swimmers is no Michael Moore-style polemic. There may be a
few uncomfortable shots of Heath managers squirming in their seats
but there is a sense of fair play to the film.
Corporation bigwigs and Heath staff, according to Ms Dickinson,
were scrupulously fair in allowing her access for the film. So she
was reluctant to “trample on their hospitality” –
despite one memorable scene where Ms McGuinness is forced to ask
her press officer the answer to a tricky question.
“I did feel guilty about including that scene because it’s
not flattering,” Ms Dickinson says.
“But if they put people like that in charge of something so
important, I do feel they’ve laid themselves open. And if you
saw all the rushes of that interview, it wasn’t untypical.
But for all the concern about their public image and the awful things
about their finances and secrecy – and it does look like there’s
going to be more trouble ahead – I can’t fault them on
my relationship in regard to the film.”
There was a happy ending for the swimmers – not quite a full-blown
Hollywood one but the removal of the threat, for the moment at least,
of either closure or forced charges for the ponds.
But as the last frame – a lingering shot of the ponds on a
sunny early summer morning – suggests, the battle is far from
over.
“A June morning 2005,” a simple caption says, “and
we hope, far into the future.”
• City Swimmres will be screened at Hampstead Everyman Cinema
on Saturday at 1pm. Book ahead on 020 7485 1457 |
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