PEDESTRIANS in Marlow High Street are to be asked about the proposed pool at Court Garden. Wycombe District Council hopes to be able to decide whether they should support and afford it.

The council will only have to pay £1 million of the £3 million cost, of which they offered £500,000 last year. Due to understandable concerns about apparent rising costs, the council deferred a decision until after the survey.

The project is to demolish the undersized pool and replace it with a 25-metre, five-lane pool with new changing and other facilities. A smaller pool for children, disabled people and beginners will operate at a higher temperature. Many will gain but none will lose!

At a capital cost of about £1 million, surely this is a bargain. It's also closer to what was conceived for Marlow many years ago. It certainly is not an anti-Handy Cross scheme, nor is the lottery money (if gained) available for any other local project. So no one loses.

However, (yes, the but!) Marlow is about to miss a golden opportunity to make the facilities more flexible and attractive to different potential users. Why not embrace existing technology and be more adventurous? Consider a movable floor, say in two halves, that can be raised or lowered to suit the clients and uses; in one piece with a constant depth or in two with a different depth in each part. Many more groups could be satisfied without losing existing users.

Remember, we are not building for 2000 but for 2025 and beyond. The Sports Council, who allocate lottery funding, says priority will be given to projects which cater for the widest cross-section of the community particularly those which emphasis groups under-represented in sports participation.

With a movable floor, for which others and I have been pressing the Millennium Consortium without success, we could accommodate activities such as diving, life-saving or sub aqua. The floor can even be raised and wheelchairs pushed on and lowered into the water! Cost, less than £300,000. So if you are asked whether you support the pool, consider would it not be a good idea to try to make it better not just bigger?

Mike Hyde

Forty Green Drive

Marlow

Converted for the new archive on 30 June 2000. Some images and formatting may have been lost in the conversion.