Methodology

The Community Pool indexes 10 UK public pools across 1 city. Every pool page carries an access score (median 74/100), verified water temperature (median 28.1°C) and a live cost calculator.

Data sources

Pool location, operator and facility data is drawn from Sport England Active Places and OpenStreetMap contributors. Adult-swim prices come from published operator fees schedules (local authority or leisure trust websites). We do not scrape pricing from booking engines.

Water temperature and crowding come from verified swimmer reports submitted through the crowding report form on each pool page. Each report is reviewed before it is aggregated into the heatmap.

Access score (0–100)

The access score is an integer derived per pool from four factors:

Transit proximity

Walking distance from the nearest London Underground / National Rail station. <400 m = full points, >1.6 km = zero.

On-site parking

Binary flag from Sport England Active Places. Adds a fixed bonus if parking is available on-site.

Accessibility features

Presence of hoist, accessible changing, family changing village. Each feature adds a fixed bonus, capped.

Opening hours coverage

Weekly hours the pool is open for public swim sessions. Normalised against a 70 h/week ceiling.

Derived metrics

All derived metrics are computed at import time from raw data and stored in the database. They never recompute at runtime, so they stay consistent across pages.

Value score

A 0–100 index that normalises adult-swim price against the feature count of each pool. A high value score means more features per £1 of entry, not simply a cheaper ticket.

Distance between pool pairs (comparisons)

Computed with the haversine formula between pool latitudes/longitudes, rounded to one decimal km. Pools more than 5 km apart are not paired by default.

Crowding heatmap

Aggregated from verified swimmer reports into a 7 days × 6 time-slots grid, bucketed as low (<35% occupancy), medium (35–70%) or high (>70%). Buckets only appear when at least one report has been verified for that slot.

Updates and corrections

Data is refreshed when operators publish new fees schedules or when crowding reports accumulate. The site does not run automatic sync against booking engines. Corrections can be requested through the contact page; we respond within 5 working days.