Features / things you probably didn't know
The story of a hidden 18th century swimming pool in Montpelier
Montpelier Health Centre is a spacious modern building serving a diverse community.
What few of its patients, or even staff, realise is that where they tread today, for hundreds of years people swam.
At the back is a paved garden, enclosed on three sides by high walls of stone and brick and normally unseen by the public.
is needed now More than ever
Still discernible are traces of an open-air swimming pool, dating from the mid-18th century.
It was known as Rennison’s Baths. You can make out one corner of the pool. The rest lies buried under the health centre.
A pen and ink drawing of Rennison’s Baths by Samuel Loxton, circa 1900 – image: Bristol Libraries
There are still steps where swimmers descended into the water. Some blue and red tiles from the sides of the pool remain in place.
This was one of the earliest public swimming baths in Britain, preceded only by the far more upmarket Peerless Pool in London.
Rennison’s included a separate smaller pool for women only.
They were built by the proprietor, Thomas Rennison, for the whole community to swim and frolic in. Next door he built a tavern and named it the Old England, which is still there.
The Rennison name was well known in Bristol, from the Georgian era up to the first world war, when Rennison’s Baths finally closed for good.
Despite attracting tens of thousands of customers a year, the family business accumulated massive debts, from reckless borrowing by Thomas and relatives.
His namesake son and grandson inherited the financial chaos. Yet somehow, the Rennisons stayed afloat.
A newspaper advertisement for the Baths from May 1767 gives an indication of the showman behind it – photo: Bristol Journal
Thomas Rennison (1707-1792) was a bold entrepreneur, originally from rural Derbyshire.
He started as a thread maker in Birmingham but was declared bankrupt in 1742, probably moving to Bristol around this time.
The 19th century Bristol chronicler John Latimer estimated Rennison’s main pool was taking customers from 1747.
Rennison had rented the site, Terrett’s Mill, to pursue his thread-making trade, but found it hard to make a living.
He noticed that a pond on the mill premises was a popular spot for boys to go skinny-dipping in the summer, and had the bright idea of charging for admission.
Rennison’s main pool, 138 feet long and 84 wide, backed onto the pond and took its water supply from Cutler’s Mill Brook.
He provided dressing rooms and a coffee house, soon converted into the Old England pub. A waterside “pleasure garden” was also developed.
The Old England is known by regulars as the Old E – photo: Peter Cullimore
Rennison’s Bath (left), with a dilapidated frontage and the Old England in 1911, with the main since-demolished Rennison family house – photo: Michael Tozer Collection, Bristol Archives, ref. 40353
Rennison lived with his wife Mary and their three children in a house adjoining the tavern.
This was 70 years before Britain’s oldest outdoor public swimming pool still in existence today.
That distinction belongs to the elegant Cleveland Pools in the city of Bath. They first opened in 1817 and are now back in use after a magnificent restoration.
Uniquely, Rennison’s Baths catered for the mass market, by charging just a couple of pennies for entry.
Thomas Rennison invented the concept of swimming pools as a cheap leisure facility, affordable to ordinary working men and women. That was his great lasting legacy.
However, Rennison also targeted well-to-do gentlemen and ladies patronising the fashionable hot wells mineral water spa across town. He offered evening musical concerts in the Old England and its tea gardens.
The swimming pool enterprise was a big gamble for a businessman relying on borrowed money.
Until the late 1700s, ‘cold baths’ in Britain had a therapeutic purpose and little swimming went on. You took a quick plunge and immersed yourself in the water.
These private baths were on the estates of landed gentry, most often as a separate bath house, but sometimes in the main house.
A good Bristol example is a stone plunge pool, built in 1790 inside the home of Caribbean plantation and slave owner John Pinney in Great George Street.
Pinney’s morning routine included jumping into the cold water to re-energise himself.
John Pinney’s cold water plunge bath was built inside his house, as part of the original design, in 1790 – photo: Bristol Museums / Georgian House
River bathing appealed to a wider public. In an era before running water was common at home, the nearest river could be the best place to wash.
Men often bathed naked – a practice frowned on by the authorities and made illegal in Bath from 1801.
At Rennison’s, the rules were more lax right up to the late 19th century.
A report to Bristol’s Baths and Wash Houses Committee in 1897 attributed a sudden drop in attendance to the enforcement of wearing a bathing costume.
An article in the Bristol Magpie claimed the true reason was that swimmers had to bathe in “putrid fluid”.
The River Malago runs through Bedminster – photo: Betty Woolerton
One 18th century enthusiast for river bathing in Bristol was a professional accountant and amateur doctor, William Dyer, who kept a diary.
In a brief entry for 7 June 1762, Dyer recorded bathing in the River Malago in Bedminster: “Rose at 5 went to Mallow-go slum and plunged myself in the water.”
A swimming place in the River Frome was also available in Dyer’s time. In July 1755, a notice in Felix Farley’s Journal offered “a bathing place in the River Froom, with commodious dressing houses”, near the Old Fox at Baptist Mills.
Thomas Rennison’s swimming baths lay just outside the city boundary in Gloucestershire, beyond the civic jurisdiction of Bristol.
Rennison, with rowdy drinkers in the Old England, took full advantage to tease the authorities.
They held an annual Montpelier Bean Feast, where a mock mayor, sheriffs and other dignitaries were elected. Rennison presided over what Latimer describes as “various high jinks”.
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Read more: 18 things you didn’t know about Montpelier
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Thomas Rennison was born in 1707 in a South Derbyshire village, the youngest of four children.
His father John Rennison, a yeoman farmer, sent him away at 16 to Birmingham as a thread maker’s apprentice.
John died in 1727, leaving unspecified debts which his will said must be settled out of his estate.
The eldest son, William, inherited the farm, on condition that he paid Thomas £200 at the end of his apprenticeship.
A decade later, Thomas had still not received the money.
In 1742 both brothers found themselves in court, facing separate actions for debt. The family had to sell their land and farmhouse, while a bankrupt Thomas exited from Birmingham to Bristol and went even deeper into the red at Terrett’s Mill.
In her own research, historian Mary Wright found that Rennison purchased the mill site in 1764 via a £400 mortgage.
He then borrowed a further £200 to finance construction of the Ladies’ Pool and the Old England pub. Rennison later remortgaged the premises, this time for £1,000.
Thomas died in his eighties in 1792, leaving the mill, baths and tavern to his namesake son, Thomas Rennison junior.
He proved no better with money. After his death in 1802, Rennison junior’s own eldest son – another Thomas – inherited the property.
The Baths survived the Napoleonic Wars thanks to the new owner’s sister-in-law, Sarah Rennison.
Sarah Burcher had married John Rennison, the youngest of Thomas senior’s grandsons, in 1801. Sarah took charge of the Baths management herself.
Even so, Thomas Rennison, grandson of the founder, was declared bankrupt in 1818. Ownership passed to the next-in-line brother, William Cox Rennison.
In a series of auctions from 1822, William sold off everything on the premises, except for the Baths.
John and wife Sarah stayed in charge of the Baths until John’s death in about 1849 ended the family’s century-long rollercoaster.
A watercolour drawing by artist Thomas Rowbotham of Montpelier in 1832. Rennison’s Baths are the buildings on the left – image: Bristol Museum & Art Gallery, ref. Mb503
Rennison’s Baths carried on regardless – under new owners but keeping the old name.
Contamination of the pool water increased from the 1840s as Bristol expanded.
Although public water supplies were transformed from 1846 by the new Bristol Water Works Company, it was different with sewage and sanitation.
Bristol had a higher mortality rate than other big cities, from a series of cholera outbreaks.
Even a prosperous suburb like Montpelier had no drainage.
Human excrement, horse manure and other waste collected in cess pools, or seeped directly into Cutler’s Mill Brook from domestic privies.
Yet still Rennison’s drew the crowds and total attendance for the summer of 1896 was 33,000.
Post-Rennison owners organised swimming lessons for schoolchildren and competitive races for all ages.
The Western Daily Press reported on a gala in September 1865: “One race was a juvenile race, between Master J.W Searle, 8 years of age… and a little girl named Alice Maude Brentnell, said to be the youngest female swimmer in Bristol.
“The race was well contested, and was ultimately won by the little girl, who distanced her opponent by one foot only.”
The swimming galas also featured a local high-board diver, Robert Backwell.
One event in August 1849 got a press build-up: “M.R.B., the celebrated diver, will be in attendance, and dive from an eminence of more than fifty feet with his boots in his hands, and will put them on before rising to the surface.”
Under municipal control later, attendance figures slumped. The Ladies’ Pool dried up and a report to the city’s Health Committee, in June 1914, told of “half an inch of slime” in the other pool.
Permanent closure followed in 1916, and the Baths were filled in.
Thomas Rennison had launched his Baths just to keep his head above water and ended up turning swimming pools into a popular leisure attraction.
They gave many generations immense pleasure – and a brief escape from their arduous working lives.
Montpelier Health Centre remains on the site that was once Rennison’s Baths – photo: Peter Cullimore
Main photo: Bristol Libraries
Read next:
- A-Z Bristol Pub Crawl: The Old England, Montpelier
- Anger as council put historic Jacob’s Wells Baths up for sale
- Touched by greatness: The history of St Paul’s forgotten cinema
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