Huge outdoor Heaton Park swimming pool has been forgotten for decades

A long forgotten open air swimming pool has been found in overgrown woodland.

The remnants of the lost lido were discovered in a wooded area of Heaton Park by Carl Harris, 57. Carl, who works as a field manager for Sky UK, told the Manchester Evening News: "This goes back before lockdown. We just went for a walk in the woods - I knew of the lido but I didn't know exactly where it was.

"[We] kind of discovered it because the perimeter of the lido is huge, it's nearly 50 metres by 23 metres we measured - the size of an Olympic swimming pool, just about. But where it's located in the woods adjacent to the boating lake, people don't know it's there as it's so overgrown with 60-years of growth.

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"It was covered in Himalayan Balsam, which is a real invasive [plant] species in the UK and is taking over the park as well, this stuff grows seven-foot tall."

Carl along with his brother Ken - who is a keen researcher into Manchester's history - discovered the pool was built and open to the public in 1926 but closed in 1939. Open air swimming pools, or lidos, experienced a golden age in the UK in the 1920s and '30s, with 169 such pools built and maintained by local councils.

Later in the 20th century, the lidos started to close as foreign holidays became cheaper and the pools increasingly expensive to maintain. During its short life, Heaton Park's lido was a big attraction to the public, and was especially important to the White Heather camp, a project to give underprivileged local children a camping holiday experience they would never otherwise have.

Through Carl's brother Ken's research into the lido, a newspaper clipping from the Manchester Evening