RESEARCH ARTICLE Municipal modernity: the politics of leisure and Johannesburg’s swimming baths, 1920s to 1930s Louis Grundlingh* History Department, University of Johannesburg, Kingsway, Aucklandpark, Johannesburg, South Africa *Corresponding author. Email: louisg@uj.ac.za Abstract In the 1920s and 1930s, the all-powerful Johannesburg Council, comprising English- speaking middle-class white males, realized the importance of providing leisure spaces and sport facilities for its white residents and prioritized the building of swimming baths in their suburbs. It was regarded as the ideal facility, supporting the growing demand for outdoor activity. The upswing in the economy in the 1920s and especially in the 1930s, expedited this endeavour, as it eased the financial expenditure. As a result, Johannesburg could boast 10 new swimming baths by the end of the 1930s. The council was adamant that the swimming baths should be on a par with international standards. This venture fitted comfortably into the larger project of transforming the economically vibrant Johannesburg into a modern city. In contrast, the first swimming bath for Johannesburg’s black residents was only built in the mid-1930s, proving that racial con- siderations determined the council’s provision of leisure facilities. Some often view swimming baths 1 simply as functional structures, oblivious that they are historically constructed public social spaces and overlooking what they represent in a community, specifically in suburbs, and what they tell of a city’s his- tory. 2 However, Van Leeuwen has prompted a scholarly interest in the swimming bath as a distinct and quintessentially modern form of urban space. 3 Wiltse 4 and Love 5 continued Van Leeuwen’s pioneering work. Wiltse traced the development © The Author(s), 2021. Published by Cambridge University Press. This is an Open Access article, distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives licence (http://creativecommons.org/ licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/), which permits non-commercial re-use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is unaltered and is properly cited. The written permission of Cambridge University Press must be obtained for commercial re-use or in order to create a derivative work. 1 On the use of nomenclature, whilst the secondary sources use the terms ‘lido’, ‘baths’ or ‘pool’, for this article, the term ‘baths’ was chosen as the primary sources used this term. They have all long been interchangeable. 2 R.E. Pick, ‘The development of baths and pools in America, 1800–1940, with emphasis on standards and practices for indoor pools, 1910–1940’, Cornell University Ph.D. thesis, 2010, 1. 3 T. Van Leeuwen, The Springboard in the Pond: An Intimate History of the Swimming Pool (Boston, MA, 1998), 12. 4 J. Wiltse, Contested Waters: A Social History of Swimming Pools in America (Chapel Hill, 2007). 5 C. Love, A Social History of Swimming in England, 1800–1918: Splashing in the Serpentine (London, 2007). Urban History (2021), 1–20 doi:10.1017/S096392682100047X use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/S096392682100047X Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. IP address: 54.90.200.82, on 20 Feb 2022 at 07:12:09, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of