Many were built in the late 1920s and early 1930s to bring the seaside to the city and provide leisure facilities for the capital’s growing population.
But cost cutting measures and the rise of affordable foreign holidays meant some – like the lidos at Victoria Park and Bounds Green – didn’t survive.
The former Victoria Park pool, which suffered bomb damage during the war, now gives its name to a field and a music festival.
While the Bounds Green Lido – also known as Durnsford Road lido and Wood Green lido – is a garden centre.
Many of the original features and structures of the lido remained when the site was converted into the Sunshine Garden Centre in 1990.
The lido opened in 1934 and was a hugely popular outdoor swimming pool with its extensive sunbathing terraces and 10 metre high diving board.
A combination of declining attendance, financial pressures, and a series of poor summers, led Haringey Council to close the lido in 1988.
The following Christmas a young man named Eamon Loughrey decided to try his hand at selling Christmas trees in the car park of the shuttered swimming pool.
By March 1990 he had opened a garden centre on the site – the empty swimming pool was surrounded by pallets of compost until it was filled in, and the Olympic-sized diving board was still in evidence but later removed to create extra space.
A post about the pool on the I Grew Up in North London Facebook page drew hundreds of responses with one sharing: “Used to spend my summers there. Happy memories.”
Many remembered the hot terraces that burned their feet, and the freezing cold water.
“Happy days- but I remember the water was absolutely freezing!” wrote one.
“We used to go there in the 60s, two families and try and set camp in the sandy part and spend all day there.”
Another recalled: “I dived off the top when I was 11 years old !! Loved it up and down like a yo-yo. Life guards would stop everyone below from using the boards so I could dive off.”
One recalled being taken from Coldfall Primary School for swimming lessons in the 1960s.
While another reminisced: “No sun block in those days!! Calamine lotion when you got home.”
