Leisure centres: crowdfunding to better serve the community

There’s a photo doing the rounds of Bridport Leisure Centre in the 1980s: an aerobics class in leg warmers, a hand-painted “Welcome to Bridport Leisure Centre” sign, the old dry-side building looking exactly like every other small-town leisure centre of its era. It’s the kind of photo that makes people stop scrolling, because so many of us learned to swim, or sweated through our first fitness class, in a building just like it.

What that photo doesn’t show is how the building got there in the first place. Bridport & West Dorset Sports Trust started life as a cricket club in 1885, on land owned by Palmers Brewery. Squash courts followed in 1975, the dry-side centre in 1986. Then, in 1983, when the town wanted a pool and nobody was going to build one for them, residents went door to door and raised £185,000 themselves. The pool opened in 1994, with Olympic swimmer Sharron Davies MBE there to mark it. The aerobics studio that opened in 1999 was even named BACIT, after the residents’ committee that raised that original £185,000.

That’s not a one-off. Up and down the country, leisure centres keep getting quietly rebuilt and reshaped by the towns that depend on them.

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The same story, again and again

In Falmouth, a community interest company took on Ships & Castles Leisure Centre to save its 25 metre pool and stop the surrounding headland going to developers, raising £42,154 with match funding from Power to Change and Sport England.

In Meopham, £15,009 went towards new spin bikes, because the way people want to train has moved on since the equipment was bought.

In Westward Ho!, Northam Town Council crowdfunded a Changing Places facility, £12,788 raised with Sport England’s backing, so that visitors and residents who need more than a standard accessible toilet actually have somewhere to go.

And in Thatcham, growing demand for junior cricket meant Kennet Leisure Centre needed indoor nets it never used to need, £30,695 raised to keep pace with a sport that had simply outgrown its old facilities.

Different towns, different asks, but the same underlying story: a leisure centre is never really finished. It keeps adapting, one campaign at a time, to whatever its community needs next.

Bridport’s next chapter

Which brings us back to Bridport. The building in the 80s photo is still standing, still running over 100 classes a week, still quietly operating as a registered charity (No. 267781) that reinvests everything it makes into SEN sessions, exercise referral programmes, cancer rehabilitation and dementia groups alongside the ordinary swim timetable.

What it doesn’t have is sufficient family and accessible changing space for a growing town. There are currently only two accessible changing rooms, with one shower between them. The plan is four large cubicles, one with its own private shower, plus five drench showers, built for disabled users, families and LGBTQ+ members currently squeezed into an unsuitable space.

The project needs £15,000 towards a total build cost of £31,060. Palmers Brewery, the same brewery whose land this all started on back in 1885, is matching donations up to £2,000 through its Community Fund. Give now, and your donation works twice as hard.

Why now

At the time of writing, the campaign has raised about £3,000 from 37 supporters. Bridport has rebuilt this place by hand once before. Every town on this list has done its own version of the same thing. This is a smaller ask than 1983’s, but it’s built from the same instinct: if the building matters to you, you help finish it.