Dive In! Whitchurch's Brand New Swimming & Fitness Centre Opens Next Month!

Shropshire Star

Transcript

00:00Hello, I'm Peter Gilbertson. I work for Shropshire Council and I'm the project manager for the

00:05Whitchurch Swimming and Fitness Centre. The centre here, we share the car park with Tesco's

00:11and if you want to visit here, if you want to come, there's a bicycle stand there,

00:14there's car parking. People who use the fitness centre, they can sign up for three hours parking

00:20so they can both go to use the fitness centre and also use Tesco's as well. As they're coming

00:25here through the main entrance, you can see here that just in front of the pool there's a

00:29cafe area where we'll have vending machines, you can get a coffee. So if you've had your swim,

00:34you can enjoy a coffee or if you're a child, you can have your hot chocolate and your crisps

00:39or if you're a parent, you can sit and watch your children having their swimming lessons.

00:44So once you come in, you sign in at the desk if you're a member or pay to go,

00:48go through the turnstiles there and turn right and that'll take you into the changing rooms.

00:55The changing rooms are very well designed so you can see we've got private cubicles and lockers on

01:00the other side. You can see right through straight away to where the pool is. So you get changed,

01:05put away your clothes, come in, there's free swim showers. You'll just have a rub down and then come

01:11into the swimming pool and obviously you can get in through the steps on the top end of the pool

01:16or we've got these easy access steps here if you're a little bit more shaky on your feet or

01:21you just like to come in at a more leisurely pace. One of the features we've got here at

01:25Whitchurch, we've got quite a large pool. It's 25 meters which is a standard for a swimming pool

01:32but it's also six lanes so it's slightly bigger than the previous pool that was here.

01:37But some of the advantages are we've got two things. We've got the easy access steps and we've

01:42also got a movable floor. So you can probably hear in the background the movable floor, the

01:47klaxon going. So what happens is the movable floor, we can drop it to the bottom of the pool

01:52so it's 1.8 meters deep and that will mean it's 1.8 meters deep across the whole length of the

01:56swimming pool or, and that's great if you want people, like swimming clubs, they want to practice

02:02diving, they want to practice lane swimming, or we can move it up so if you've got a children's

02:07group, say from the primary school and we want the water to be a meter deep, we can move the

02:11pool up to a meter, they can climb in through the steps, they can have their swimming lesson.

02:15When they've finished, we can go back, change a different height or if you have a mother and

02:21toddlers or parent and toddlers group, you could maybe just have it just a few centimetres deep

02:25to let them have a splash session. So we can use it, it gives us, you know, great flexibility

02:31on what's been quite a small site. If you go upstairs, we've got, at the front of the centre,

02:38we've got a fitness gym that overlooks Whitchurch so we've got a fantastic window that looks out

02:44over Whitchurch so anyone who goes to the fitness gym there can be working out on the machines,

02:49on the treadmills and what have you, and have a fantastic view, and also room for, we've also

02:54got a special weights area where people do their weight training. And then moving down the corridor,

02:59we've got changing rooms for the fitness area which have been developed to quite a high standard.

03:04We've also got a large studio space that can be divided in two, so we have a large studio, we've

03:08got a large group going. If we've got smaller groups, we can close the movable wall that's

03:14soundproofed and we have two smaller fitness areas. Yes, it was quite a run-down area of

03:22Whitchurch, so we had the old youth centre which was derelict, it was full of asbestos, it lost its

03:28roof, we had the disused sort of basketball place and it'd become a bit of a sort of hangout

03:35for undesirable behaviour. So what we've done is we've cleared all that away, we've created,

03:40we've recreated a footpath so you can walk across Whiteline Meadow and we've put a new play area in,

03:45you know, we spoke to the town council nearly two years ago and said what would you like to see

03:49there and they said a children's play area, so that's what we've created and that's what you've

03:53got there. Well, the builders are finishing up this Thursday and we'll be handing over the keys

03:59to our operator Serco and I'm hoping that they will open the doors for people to look around

04:05like we've done from Friday. So you come in and have a look around, see the facilities because

04:09no one's been in since we started this project and if they want to they can sign up for membership or

04:14at least have a good look and then Serco over the next few weeks are going to be finishing off and

04:20doing the fit out. So they'll be putting in the gym equipment, there's all the safety signage,

04:25there's the seating for the cafe area, that's all got to be completed and also we've got 25

04:30new members of staff that need to be trained in how to operate the movable floor, all the

04:35filtration equipment, the heating etc. So in terms of paying guests, we should be open for paying

04:43guests to use the facility on the 19th of March.

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