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Is now the perfect time to install a swimming pool in your back garden?
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During the cloudless skies of the first lockdown, some turned their houses and gardens into top-notch private leisure centres. Former prime minister Rishi Sunak built a 12m swimming pool at his home in Yorkshire. His predecessor Boris Johnson followed suit in 2023, gaining permission for an outdoor pool at his house in south Oxfordshire – despite planning wobbles over the presence of a newt colony nearby.
As the weather turns scorching, you may be tempted to do the same thing in your own garden, even if it's in the city. But should you?
Swimming pools in the gardens of large country houses are often referred to by estate agents as among the top 'toys' that make up the ideal family home, along with tennis courts, home gyms and party barns.
The appetite for outdoor pools in the UK tends to wax and wane. After the financial crash of 2007, demand softened as many were put off by the annual running costs. However, the increased efficiency of air-source heat pumps has significantly reduced these, and many modern pool designs tend to avoid having a deep end, resulting in less water to heat in the first place.
You'll find pools in luxurious homes across the stockbroker belt and into the Cotswolds and beyond, but they are more unusual in city gardens.
Small garden? No problem
Analysis from Yopa, an online estate agency, found that properties with pools account for less than 5pc of all the properties on the market. And, it added, just one in five are selling. Houses with pools cost significantly more than those without: the average asking price for a property with a swimming pool in April was £490,498 compared with the wider average asking price of £267,500. In London, the average price of a property with a pool, according to Yopa's research, was £961,000.
A swimming pool in the back garden will rarely add value to a property; it might do the opposite, even for those in the countryside, warns Verona Frankish, of Yopa. 'A swimming pool can seem like the ultimate property feature, particularly when we do get a spell of warm weather, but it's probably not as appealing as you think when it comes to buyer appetites for such properties.'
Marc Schneiderman of Arlington Residential, an estate agency based in St John's Wood, north-west London, thinks differently. 'It's absolutely worth putting in a pool even if the garden is very small,' he says.
'Outdoor pools are pretty rare, certainly in more central London locations. On average, only 5pc of houses we have handled in the past few years have an outdoor swimming pool. With the weather in the summer months seeming to get hotter each year, those properties with pools are super desirable to certain buyers and give the house a unique selling feature, even if it is at the expense of the overall garden space.'
City vs the suburbs
Estate agency The Modern House recently sold two ordinary-looking terraced houses in London with surprise swimming pools in the back garden. One was in Forest Gate, in a slowly gentrifying corner of east London on the Elizabeth Line. The house had an asking price of £1.2m, considerably higher than the average £540,462 price of a terraced house in the area, according to property portal Rightmove.
The other, near Wood Green in north London, was on the market for £1.6m; houses in the area sell on average for £649,466. It featured palm trees in the garden which provoked an Instagram user to coin it 'Costa del Haringey'.
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There is no formal record of the number of private outdoor swimming pools in London gardens. However, Rob Grant, for a newsletter on Substack, estimated that there are 3,200 private outdoor swimming pools in London. He did this using data from the Greater London Authority.
Outer London boroughs, such as Richmond-upon-Thames, Bromley and Havering, had the highest concentration of back garden swimming pools, although there is a cluster in more central locations, including Hampstead and Wandsworth. This tallies with figures from London Swimming Pool Company, an installer: 15pc of all the pools they have built for private clients in London over the past 30 years have been in Wimbledon where gardens are generally more generous in size. Other areas the company has worked in include Primrose Hill and St John's Wood.
Savills is currently marketing a seven-bedroom detached property in Parkside, Wimbledon Village, for £13.9m, and a large, seven-bedroom house near Tooting Common with an outdoor pool is also on the market for £3.5m with Savills. Knight Frank, meanwhile, is selling a double-fronted Victorian house in Wandsworth with an indoor pool in the back garden for £3.975m.
Planning rules and costs
Most urban homeowners with a large enough rear garden can build an outdoor pool under permitted development rights, providing they don't take up more than 50pc of the total area. It's advisable to check with the council before contracting a digger just in case there are any exclusions in the local area.
There are other aspects to consider including where the pool's water will discharge. If the plan is to drain into the public sewer, that might need permission from the local water authority. In April, Water UK, which represents the 16 water and sewage companies in England and Wales, proposed charging some households, such as those with swimming pools or big gardens, more for the water they use.
Compass Pools by Waterstream is the biggest installer of pools in the UK, building around 100 a year. To date, their business is up 40pc on last year, thanks to the long dry spring. Four fifths of its clients opt for outdoor swimming pools and the average price is £130,000, although those made with concrete blocks and a vinyl liner are cheaper to install.
Access to allow an excavator to reach the back garden in a city house and carry out the essential digging work is the main factor that will impact the cost of a back garden pool.
'In London, it can get quite expensive because cranes are often required to move the excavator into place when we're working in the garden of a terraced house,' says Alex Kearnsley, from Compass Pools. 'You're almost certainly looking at a starting price of six figures.'
Compass-designed pools for back gardens are typically made from ceramic composite similar to that used in yacht building and are built off-site. This ensures that installation is far quicker than a conventional concrete pool. Once the excavation work has been completed, the structure is then craned into the garden in one day along with all the equipment for the plant 'room' (in reality a small, half-height shed).
The challenge is delivering a pool down narrow and congested London streets using a specially adapted articulated lorry. This will involve suspending on-street parking for the day – a process that Kearnsley describes as 'good fun'.
Typical town or city pools will be either in the form of a swim lane used for exercise, measuring about 12m long and 2.5m wide and positioned down one length of the garden. Families tend to go for a plunge pool of 8m by 4m, although they can be as small as 4m x 2m if space is limited.
There needs to be a minimum decking space of 1.2m around the pool to allow for access and emergency exits, which are normally paved, and space for the equipment such as pumps and filters. As 90pc of outdoor swimming pools are heated by air-source heat pumps, space needs to be allocated for these too.
Where space is a concern, some owners opt to install a hard cover over the pool so that it can be used as a patio off-season. Compass offers this service, which costs approximately £20,000 to install.
