The men’s pond

• HAMPSTEAD Heath is public property acquired for all Londoners in the 19th century, and governed by the 1871 Hampstead Heath Act.

After the 1986 abolition of the Greater London Council, management passed indirectly to the Corporation of the City of London in 1989.

Given the Square Mile’s lack of large tracts of open space, the decision was perplexing; the City’s expertise historically has been finance, not land husbandry.

The calling-card was the almost immediate draining and a closure, lasting many months, of the men’s pond, a cause of serious inconvenience to bathers during that summer.

Any long-term benefit seems questionable as water quality is visibly worse and algal outbreaks (previously unknown) are now a recurrent problem.

At reopening bathers were shocked to find the formerly open changing and recreation area was now segregated into a clothed and a nudist space.

If the corporation had consulted the public, or even given advance warning of its scheme, that was at a homoeopathic level of detectability. Long-term users reluctantly tolerated the new administrators’ unpopular and ghettoising erection.

Around a decade later, after a similar level of canvassing of stake-holders, and ignoring over 80 years of free access, charging was introduced. Initially optional, that became compulsory during Covid-19 restrictions.

Though a jealous guardian of its own traditions, the fact that all three Heath bathing ponds had been free since time immemorial counted for nothing with the corporation.

The previous administrators (the London County Council, then the GLC) had carried the cost through all the financial and political upheavals of their tenures, but the Corporation of the City of London, one of the richest local authorities in the world, asserted that it lacked funds to continue the practice.

On May 24 2023, consistent with its earlier high-handed precedents, the corporation announced a ban on nudism. Dan Carrier’s article reported the assertion of a corporation spokesperson that “complaints” had been lodged, (Men’s Pond sunbathers: ‘We’ll go nude when we want’, June 1).

Deploying the corporation’s historic exemption from Freedom of Information legislation, that spokesperson has declined to furnish any greater detail.

It seems that the corporation is free to make any decision and claim any pretext for said decision, without submitting the process behind it to public scrutiny.

Those directly affected will never know whether the “complaints” were taken at face-value or investigated for veracity, sincerity and vexatiousness, the work perhaps of “culture-wars” vigilantes with access to the Mansion House in pursuit of a private anti-equality agenda.

Responsibility for Hampstead Heath and some other open spaces in Greater London was passed to the corporation when a London-wide governing body ceased to exist. With the establishing of the London Assembly, that is no longer so.

Perhaps it is time now to review the continuation of the corporation’s secretive and unaccountable role in these publicly-owned assets.

CRISPIN DAWES
College Cross, N1