5 Best Swimming Pools In Northamptonshire

Corby International Swimming Diving Pool is built to a competition specification, which means serious depth and boards, and that is a spectacle, not a splash. Diving areas normally run to their own session times and their own minimum ages, and deep water is not where you take a child who is still in armbands. For a swimmer who has outgrown the shallow end it is a rare thing to have on the doorstep. Check which sessions the diving area is open for before you go.

Splash Leisure Pool, Rushden signals its intent in the name, and leisure pools generally mean shallower water, warmer temperatures and something more interesting than lane ropes. That is what an under-seven wants from a pool. Do confirm with the centre what is running during your visit, since features like flumes or wave sessions are often timetabled and not constant, and a child promised a slide who finds a rectangle of water is hard to console.

Less than it would for a day out. A local pool is a place you use repeatedly and not one you travel to once, so the things that pull a score down — a tired changing area, a slow queue at reception — become minor irritations and not a ruined trip. Judge on the water temperature, the session timetable and whether the parking works, because those are the three things that decide whether you go back next week.

The timetable, always. School lessons, club hire and adult-only sessions carve up the week in every leisure centre, and a pool that looks open may have very little of it available to the public at that hour. Ask about supervision ratios if you have more than one non-swimmer, ask whether armbands are provided or must be brought, and find out whether lockers want a coin, because the answer is often yes and nobody carries change any more.