12 Best Swimming Pools In Hertfordshire

The Priory Lido is the clearest, flagged outdoor with no indoor marker, so plan it as a weather-dependent trip rather than a fixture. Several others carry both flags, which tends to mean a building with an outdoor pool alongside, and that combination is the practical choice with a mixed-age family. Check each venue's own page for which pools are actually open to the public on the day, since an outdoor pool is the first thing to be taken out of service.

Not entirely. It is recorded here with outdoor space and no indoor marker, and it holds the top rating here, a combination that does not sit comfortably for a facility of that name. Our flags are set once for a whole site and go stale, so this is the sort of entry to verify rather than assume. If an indoor pool is what you need that day, confirm it with the venue before you load the car.

It is a park with open water, filed here because our categories had to put it somewhere, and that is a different proposition from a pool with a shallow end and a lifeguard on a chair. Open water carries its own rules and its own risks, and what is allowed there varies. Read its own page carefully, and do not take a category heading as permission to get in. As a place to spend an afternoon it may be excellent; as a swim with small children it is not the same thing.

By fixing the fallback in advance and telling the children about it before anybody packs a costume, not afterwards. Outdoor swimming here lives or dies on a forecast that changes hourly, and the disappointment is much smaller if the alternative was always part of the plan. Pick your outdoor entry and your indoor entry from this list on the same morning, choose between them at the door if you have to, and nobody's day collapses.