Lido fully booked but not full

Lido fully booked but not full

Monday 14 July 2025

As the third heatwave of the year fades away, we’re especially full of appreciation for our lovely lido — such a wonderful way to cool off, keep fit, and enjoy the outdoors.

But as many lido users have been telling us, since the lido re-opened on 27 June, it’s been incredibly difficult to book a slot — the lido is typically fully booked a week in advance.

This may not seem surprising when the weather makes swimming outdoors so appealing. But other lidos (e.g. London Fields, Brockwell, Charlton) don’t sell out in the same way. And when users do manage to get into a sold-out Park Road, they’re finding the pool far from full.

So what’s going on?

The centre has been highlighting pay-monthly members booking more slots than they need, leading to lots of “no-shows”. We’ve urged all pay-monthly lido users to book only the slots they need and to cancel any they can’t attend at the earliest opportunity.

We’re also aware of pay-as-you-go users who’ve booked and paid for a slot in advance but can no longer attend and want to cancel, solely so that someone else can benefit from their slot (they’re aware there are no refunds); this isn’t currently possible at Park Road, so these slots go unused.

But — while there may be issues with how a small number of people are using the booking system — we believe the main causes of under-utilisation are the low booking capacity limits for each swimming slot and limited opening hours. 

The current booking setup caps bookings at 100 lane swimmers per hour; this limit has recently been as low as 60, and for session ends is 50 per hour. Assuming an average 30 minutes swimming, even if everyone who’s booked shows up just 25–50 people will be in the water at any one time, when our 50⨉23m pool can accommodate around 100.

And this is what we’re seeing. So-called bather loads at this level are a huge missed opportunity for everyone involved.

For weekend family sessions, the limit has been set at 200 over a two-hour period, yet the pool has the capacity for hundreds of general swimmers at any one time.

The difference in approach is stark when comparing Brockwell Lido’s booking capacity with Park Road’s (see tables below). Brockwell Lido is slightly larger — at 50⨉27m it’s 17% bigger — but on weekdays offers two and a half times (150% more) the number of lane swimming slots and ten times the number of family swims. On weekends, Brockwell offers four times the number of family swims and at least 60% more lane swims.  

Park Road’s shorter summer opening hours are part of the issue too. On weekdays, Park Road currently opens at 07:00 rather than 06:30 and closes at 19:00 instead of 20:00 as it has done before. Meanwhile, Brockwell opens at 06:30 and closes at 21:00. On Saturdays, our lido opens at 08:00 and closes at 16:00 while Brockwell is open 06:30–18:00.

We’ve repeatedly asked for higher capacity limits and longer opening hours, including at our last meeting with Haringey Council on 11 June. The issue will be top of our agenda when we meet the council again this week.

Make sure you sign up to our email list below to keep up to date, and let us know what you think by emailing parkroadlug@gmail.com.