12 Best Swimming Pools In Somerset and Bristol

Cold water and a lot of weather. An unheated or lightly heated outdoor pool is bracing, not warm, and children last a shorter time in it than they do indoors, so plan a shorter swim with somewhere to sit in between. They also depend on the season and the sky in a way an indoor pool does not. Check on the morning itself, because sunshine is no guarantee that an open-air pool is running.

You often cannot from the name, which is why a phone call saves the trip. Ask what is in the water during your slot: lane ropes, a swimming lesson, a club booking or a general public session are four very different afternoons. Some sites also run inflatables at set times and nothing at others. Two minutes on the phone tells you more about how the visit will go than any amount of reading.

Not unduly. Pools get judged on changing rooms, queues and lockers as much as on the water, and those are the parts of a leisure centre most likely to be tired. A middling score often means a perfectly good pool attached to a dated building. What it seldom means is a poor swim, so weigh a low rating against how far you would otherwise travel, and read a couple of recent comments to see which half of the visit people are complaining about.

An indoor pool is a session, not a day, and it is best treated as half of something. The open-air pools are the exception, because on a warm afternoon families settle in with towels and food and stay. If you want a full day out of the indoor options, plan the swim for the end of it — tired children in a pool go home quietly, tired children after a pool complain the whole way to wherever you had planned next.