Pictures: How Shrewsbury's Quarry pool was born
Fascinating pictures of Shrewsbury's Victorian swimming pool were released today – as councillors were discussing whether it should be demolished.
Images from the Shropshire Archives Collection give an insight into the pool's previous incarnation, the Jubilee Baths.
Today, campaigners were attending a meeting of Shropshire Council's cabinet to question the recommendation to close the Quarry pool and build a new one at Shrewsbury Sports Village.
Hundreds have attended protest rallies calling for the town centre site to be retained as a swimming pool, keeping up a tradition that dates to 1894.
Shropshire Council wants to build a new pool at the Sports Village in Sundorne.
But it has also given groups up to 12 months to come up with an acceptable plan to keep the Quarry pool open.
Based at the same Quarry site the Jubilee Baths were built in 1894 at a cost of £8,000 - considerably less than the £9 million it will cost to build a modern replacement.
They were designed by W. Chapple Eddowes, and were built mainly thanks to public donation.
Alderman Butler Lloyd, a local businessman and ex-mayor, raised funds to construct the baths as a memorial to Queen Victoria's Jubilee.
The public embraced the new baths with more than 38,000 people believed to have used them in the first three months.
Some Shrewsbury residents can still remember going there to bathe because their own homes had no bathroom.
The bath's water was heated by live steam injection.
By 1955 a huge demand upon the pools meant that work began on new facilities which were completed in August 1969.
The new construction and the modernisation were phased so that swimming could continue throughout.
The new baths, which make up the majority of the building you see today, were opened in 1969.
They were designed and constructed under the direction of R.W. Gibb, the Borough Surveyor. The total cost was around £500,000 of which £120,000 was for the modernisation of the old baths.
