Jubilee Pool

The largest seawater lido in the UK: a triangular Art Deco pool holding around five million litres on Battery Rocks, designed by Captain F Latham, Penzance's borough engineer, and opened in May 1935, the year of George V's silver jubilee. The streamlined high walls were designed to take storm waves and mostly have — catastrophic damage in 2014 forced a £2.94m restoration — and since 2017 the pool has been run by a charitable community benefit society, an asset handed from the council back to the town, with some 1,400 shareholders after a community share offer raised nearly £540,000. In 2020 it became the UK's first geothermally heated lido: one section held at 28–30°C by salt water drawn from a well sunk 410 metres into the granite. Grade II listed, lifeguarded, with a café looking over Mount's Bay; the season runs spring to autumn, with full-moon swims and an annual sea swim in the calendar.