Revisiting the past – Ponds Forge International Sports Centre, Sheffield
Back in the days when I was a young, fresh-faced and newly qualified Architect with hair, a train of circumstances led me to being the sole Site Architect on this extremely prestigious project.
I was lucky enough to take part in the original Architectural Competition for a new Olympic-sized swimming pool and diving, along with a host of other facilities for the World Student Games that were going to take place in the UK in 1991.
We won. And the office put together a series of design teams to tackle this huge project. I was put in charge of the pool hall while other Architects were in charge of the entrance and central rotunda, and sports hall and car parking.
It was a whirlwind of design activity. This was going to be the first 50m Olympic-sized swimming pool in the UK in decades and we determined it had to be ‘fast’ and had to be a venue to break swimming records. The FINA requirements for the length of the pool are unsurprisingly very onerous being between +0mm and -30mm over the 50m length of the pool. 30mm more than 50m (0.0006 of the overall length) is certainly the difference between breaking a World Record or not.
So, a number of key design decisions were made that still hold true to today.
- The pool was designed to be 3m deep throughout to prevent swimmers ‘shock-waves’ bouncing back from the pool base and which would cause extra drag to slow swimmers down. We introduced large ‘floating floors’ on both ends of the pool which would reduce water depths when needed for swimming training for kids and families.
- The pool width was 25m, which was 10 lanes of 2.5m. Swimming events only use 8 lanes so swimmers in lanes 1 & 8 are not disadvantaged by the shock waves off the side wall in these lanes.
- We designed the 50m pool to be actually 52.5m long between tiled surfaces. Then we added two ‘floating bulkheads’ to either end and this meant the pool length could be fine-tuned with lazer measurements to anchor points for the bulkheads which gave precisely 50.0000m in length.
The rest was down to the swimmers and if you look it up, Ponds Forge International Sports Centre in Sheffield has had its fair share of World Records since the very successful World Student Games of 1991.
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