When I think of my grandfather, I picture him standing in his trunks, arms stretched above his head, teaching my school friend to dive. A former naval recruit, he loved spending time in the water when he visited us at home in Edinburgh. In his own town of Grange-over-Sands in Cumbria, he had nowhere to swim.
The old Grange Lido was hard to miss, a giant barnacle on the side of the promenade that divided the town from the wilds of Morecambe Bay. Built in 1932 in the art deco style, it trapped the seawater and tamed it. But after high tides breached its walls in 1977, the money to maintain the lido began to run out and local swimmers retreated to indoor pools. In 1993 its doors were locked for good. For decades, if you found a crack in the boards that surrounded it, you glimpsed the sky reflected in the rainwater that filled the pool.
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