The pyramid at Bletchley Leisure Centre was the kind of architectural promise the early 1970s seemed determined to keep. Steel-framed, glazed, geometrically confident, it housed the pool from the moment the centre opened in the mid-1970s, on the assumption that a Buckinghamshire new town deserved a building that looked, from the right angle, like a small world's fair pavilion. Some local groups tried to get it listed when the demolition plans firmed up. They lost. A replacement opened in 2009, the old centre came down around the same time, and the site is mostly housing and car park now.

The boom that produced it was extraordinary. Across the 1970s British councils opened hundreds of leisure centres, most of them designed in-house or by regional practices working in some local dialect of Brutalism or late-modernist whimsy. Swindon got the Oasis in 1976, a perspex-glazed dome over the pool, and ran it for forty-four years. Coventry got its sports centre the same year. Other towns got geodesic domes, butterfly roofs, sunken courts, vending mezzanines, all of it executed in concrete and stained timber. These weren't private gyms with sliding-fee memberships. They were civic infrastructure, expected to outlast the councillors who cut their ribbons.

The thing that makes them feel haunted now is not that they're closing. Public buildings have always closed. It's the particular gap between what they were built to mean and what the institutional vocabulary around them has shrunk to. A 1974 leisure centre was a forty-year bet on universal access to swimming, racquets, badminton, sauna, and a vending area with the chairs bolted to the floor. The bet was placed by councils that still had a meaningful capital budget, and by an architectural culture that hadn't yet learned to apologise for using concrete in public.

The Twentieth Century Society now runs a Leisure Centres campaign trying to get the surviving ones listed. Swindon's Oasis was permanently closed in November 2020 after COVID, placed on the Society's Top 10 Buildings at Risk list in May 2021, and given Grade II protection on its dome that December. The Guardian's January 2023 piece ran the list of recent or imminent closures: Huddersfield, Milton Keynes, Rye, Coventry, Hull, Gateshead waiting on a council decision about two big centres. The actuarial point is mechanical. A whole cohort of these buildings has hit the end of its design life at roughly the same moment. Austerity took the operating budget; COVID emptied the reserves; the boilers were already on borrowed time. The same civic-defunding logic that gutted reference libraries has been pulling the leisure estate down by inches.

What survives is a strange double image. You can walk past a 1976 leisure centre with its original lettering and its Brutalist car park still attached and read it as an ordinary closed building, or you can read it as the physical residue of a particular kind of optimism about what a council was for. The thinking that built it has been quietly retired. The building hasn't, because demolition is also expensive. There is a useful parallel with the postwar prefab estates, which were officially temporary and quietly outlived their ten-year design life by half a century. Civic ambition keeps leaving these very specific physical traces, and the country keeps not quite knowing what to do with them.

I keep coming back to Bradford. The listed but empty 1970s leisure centre there is being seriously considered for conversion into what's been described as a world-class skatepark. Whatever one thinks of that as adaptive reuse, there is something honest about it. The skatepark proposal at least admits that the original civic programme isn't coming back. The harder cases are the ones where the council still pretends a refurbishment is a year or two away and the building sits there for a decade with handwritten signs taped to the doors. The promise has gone. The room is still standing in the position the promise put it in.

Sources: