While the once-outrageously filthy River Thames isn’t quite ready to welcome swim cap- and goggle-donning Londoners (but if all goes as planned it soon will be) for extended dips, the next best thing when it comes to chemical-free urban bathing recently opened for business in the British capital city’s King’s Cross section: an inner city freshwater swimming hole-cum-art installation that eschews chlorine and is instead filtered and cleaned naturally by aquatic plants.

Named King’s Cross Pond Club (full installation title: “Of Soil and Water: King’s Cross Pond Club”) is the first public natural swimming pond (NSP) to welcome swimmers in the United Kingdom.

Marrying the time-honored British pastimes of organic gardening and landscape design with al fresco leisure and recreation, the natural swimming pond movement has attracted a strong following in England. However, natural swimming ponds, until now, have remained largely confined to private backyards and estates. The concept of a non-residential natural bathing pond — a concept that’s immensely popular in Germany and Austria where the pools are known as Schwimmteiche — is relatively new to the Brits.

Nestled within Lewis Cubitt Park, the 40-meter-long (131-feet) kidney-shaped pool found at King’s Cross Pond Club is the creation of Eva Pfannes and Sylvain Hartenberg of Rotterdam-based design firm Ooze Architects in collaboration with Slovenian artist Marjetica Potrč.

Described as both a “micro-ecological environment” and an “innovative piece of land art,” the primary aim of this next-gen lido is “communication with visitors, describing the balance of man with nature, and the balance of living in a sustainable city."

From an operations standpoint, the pond functions more like an art installation than a proper parks department-operated public swimming pool: access to the pond is both timed (there’s a two-hour maximum for each designed “session”) and ticketed (ticket prices through the pre-booking system range from between £3.50 and £6.50 or roughly $5.30 and $10).

Non-swimmers who wish to access the immediate pond area must fork over a £2 “spectator’s fee.” There’s also a public viewing gallery adjacent to the pond that’s gratis to enter.

And true to its art installation status, King’s Cross Pond Club is ephemeral in nature. The pond will remain in Lewis Cubitt Park for “at least two years,” although there is the chance it could stick around for longer if it proves popular and attracts big crowds (pond scrum?).

On the topic of crowd control, it’s also worth pointing out that the facility's capacity for an entire day, not just a single session, is 160 bathers. As the King’s Cross Pond Club website explains:

The unique nature of the pond means that it is completely natural, chemical free and relies on a filtration system to clean the water. This means that there is a finite number of bodies that can enter the water per 24 hour period and this is 160 people. Unfortunately, after 160 people have entered the pool, no matter how long they have swum for (or how clean they are) we will close access and let the pond breathe.

Despite operating as an urban swimming hole where “visitors enter the water and participate in the installation as a piece of experiential art,” King’s Cross Pond Club also sports many standard features that swimmers would find at a more "traditional" (read: chlorinated) lido: lifeguards, changing rooms, lockers, picnic area and an adjacent snack bar (the vittles are organic/seasonal, natch). While the pond lacks designated lanes for lap swimming (“like the wild, there are no lane lines to guide you) there is a “allocated safe zone” in the pond’s most shallow area for the kiddos. And just because King’s Cross Pond Club is a nature-infused interactive art project, this doesn’t mean that bathers can do away with their bathing suits altogether and plunge in au natural: skinny dipping is strictly prohibited. So how, you may ask, does the pond naturally clean itself without the aid of harsh chemicals, ultraviolet systems and the like? A bit of explanation behind the pond's bio-filtration process:

'Of Soil and Water: King's Cross Pond Club' is a bathing pond, in a natural oblong shape, built two metres above ground level and 10m wide x 40m long. Its central pool is surrounded by both hard and soft landscaping, including pioneer plants, wild flowers grasses, and bushes so that the environment evolves as the seasons change. The swimming pond will be purified through a natural closed-loop process, using wetland and submerged water plants to filter and sustain clean and clear water. As the UK's first public man-made, naturally purified outdoor bathing pond, Of Soil and Water is engineered and built by Europe's leading natural pool designers BIOTOP and its UK partner, Kingcombe Aquacare Ltd.

Swimmers descend on London's plant-cleaned public bathing pond

Would you hop (no diving allowed!) into a chlorine-free urban swimming hole that's open to the public?