Taking Care: The socio-cultural relationships between outdoor swimming and environmental health at Windermere

Outdoor swimming within coastal and inland freshwaters has attracted renewed academic and popular interest, often framed by biomedical research emphasising the individualised health 'benefits' for humans. Yet these universal health claims often overlook the socio-cultural, political, and environmental contexts, as well as the potential risks that swimmers pose to these fragile ecologies. At Windermere, England’s largest lake in the Lake District National Park, swimmers negotiate contested access, conflicting users, swim safety, and public health communications, alongside environmental health risks such as extreme weather, wastewater, run-off, blue-green algal blooms, pathogenic bacteria, plastic pollution, biosecurity concerns, and climate change. These entangled/conflicting factors require a relational and more-than-human research approach to understanding health that foregrounds care and responsibility. My thesis addresses these challenges through a situated, care-ful, and relational 12-month wet ethnographic approach, combining observational lake-hangouts and swim-along interview responses with different swimmers. Working with the concepts of therapeutic accretion and polluted leisure, my thesis disrupts inward and romanticised health framings of ‘swimming in nature’ by highlighting how swimmers adapt to, downplay, or selectively dismiss environmental health risks through their emotional, embodied, and socio-cultural attachments formed over time with this iconic picturesque site. Class-based tensions between regular and infrequent users also further reveal moral anxieties and inequities over purity, pollution, blame, and belonging. Five contributions are made to health geographies and multidisciplinary research on outdoor swimming by: (1) Emphasising how swimmers’ immediate human health experiences remain influenced by wider socio-cultural, political, and environmental factors; (2) Highlighting how concerns of sewage, blue-green algal blooms, and ecological decline at Windermere linger for swimmers, yet are often outweighed by sensory intensities, personal health motivations, picturesque attachments, and conflicting accounts of care and responsibility; (3) Discussing how romantic idylls over nature as pure and pristine, alongside class-based localisms shape social belonging and orderings, often displacing inequitable moral associations of blame onto those outside regular communities; (4) Demonstrating how ethical and care-ful research principles prioritise researcher and participant wellbeing, as well as an advocacy for socially and environmentally conscious outdoor swimming; and (5) Illustrating how additional research outputs, events, and cross-sectoral and disciplinary collaborations can engage academic and wider communities invested in outdoor swimming and environmental health at Windermere.<p></p>