Publications
Tom Kearney (2011) - I Got Better
You do not see the sixteen-ton bendy bus moving toward you at 30 feet per second. You do not feel it hitting your head and body, your left lung bursting from the impact while the ribs on your right side break and pierce your right lung and also your liver. You do not feel yourself flying fifteen feet through
the air, your head and body smashing on the street, your skull cracking on both sides. You do not see yourself lying on the street, blood flowing out of your ears and mouth, still smartly-dressed for the office. This is an account of Tom Kearney's being hit by a bus in London's Oxford. Out of trauma can come good - this event changed his life and made him an all-seasons everyday open water swimmer.
Georgie Milner (2022) - Swimming and Social Exclusion in the UK. Undergraduate Dissertation in Human Sciences, University of Oxford.
This undergraduate dissertation examines how swimming provision in the Greater Manchester Area intersects with social exclusion. It argues that striving for equal access to swimming opportunities, via dismantling historical legacies of exclusion, forging safe spaces, and ensuring the provision of accessible swimming pools, is necessary for health and social justice.
Grace Wright-Arora (2021) - “Where the Normal Rules Don’t Apply”: Cold-Water Swimming as a Postmodern Subculture of Resistance
This undergraduate dissertation from the University of Bristol examines cold water swimming as a political act. Resistance – to body shaming, to the physical constraints of a swimming pool – while an individual act, can also be political. Grace Wright-Arora wrote her undergraduate thesis on cold water swimming as a form of Foucauldian resistance. French philosopher Michel Foucault wrote that where there is power, there is also resistance to it. In London, she interviewed people who swim at the Serpentine Swimming Club and the Hampstead Ponds, while near Bristol she interviewed people who swim at the Clevedon Marine Pool.
Stanley Ulijaszek (2022) - Kicking a stink in river waters
Open water swimmers in the UK are outraged by the continued dumping of raw sewage into rivers and the ocean. In this work, Stanley Ulijaszek is trying to make sense of it all, writing about the disconnects between legislation, regulation, provision, and use, that have gotten the UK into this watery mess. He calls it 'The Second Great Stink' (the first being in the nineteenth century), a time to rethink again these relationships so that swimming in clean waters is again assured.
House of Commons Environmental Audit Committee (2022) - Water quality in rivers
Probably the first UK Parliamentary Report that gives wild swimming a place in much needed improvement of UK inland waters. The report states unambiguously that 'rivers in England are in a mess'. Section 2, entitled 'Rivers fit to swim in', concludes that 'Every community in the country should have access to waters—whether coastal or inland—that are safe for people to swim in without running the risk of falling ill'. And recommends that 'the Government actively encourage the designation of at least one widely used stretch of river for bathing in each water company area by 2025 at the latest'. The strongest statement of intent to find the metaphorical 'Bower by the silver Thames' that river swimmers seek.
