Lost city: St Augustines Swimming Pool

I miss St. Augustines Swimming Pool every time I go to the deep end of Spar to buy a can of beans or a pork pie.

Those strange “no bombing, no petting” signs, the frigid water, the stinging eyes, and the cheap hot cocoa.

For many Norwich and Norfolk residents who spent at least some of their childhoods splashing around here, the

high arched windows filled with bluey light at night were a vastly reversible, temporally dislocated improvement on

the Spar shop, and the takeaways that finally killed what was left of St Augustine’s Street’s trade. This post-war

development may not be the most attractive building by our oddly skewed modern standards, but it is also not ugly

and beautiful by association.

was either free or inexpensive to use for swimming. Later on, it also included a cheap gym. destroyed in the early

2000s. We watched it being disassembled, and I was a little disappointed that I had never used the high diving board

since I’m not good at heights.

On the first night of the Baedeker Raids on April 27 and 28, 1942, it was St. Augustines School, this time facing St.

Augustines Gate, 500kg, Bang. Not in use. Before it was used for anything else, it served as a rest centre. Strangely,

in the original image, there is a surface shelter just to the right.

From David Percival’s Grandson Richard (Via Flickr – I hope he doesn’t mind)

Sitting in an office in New York, I decided to research buildings that my grandfather David had created as a city

architect. It was heartbreaking to see another one destroyed, such as his library, which burned down. Although their

modernist concrete design is no longer very popular, the enormous amount of post-war building renovation that they

had to accomplish and the resulting tight finances did not assist quality, but those soaring windows are very lovely.

However, I also believe that part of it should be kept over time since it illustrates the state of the nation in the middle

of the 20th century. Additionally, he oversaw the sensitive restoration of some historic Norwich buildings, including

Elm Hill and the Castle.