Birtley Community Pool Celebrates Six Months!

Birtley Community Pool re-opened six months ago, after locals got together and raised money to re-open this well loved community space.

Transcript

00:00Bertley Community Pool has officially been open to the public again for six months after Gateshead

00:06Council unfortunately closed it down and locals came together to have it reopened. I popped down

00:11to speak with Yvonne and Matthew to find out how they've been getting on in the past six months

00:16and what's to come for this crucial community space. So I'm a keen swimmer, I have been since

00:22I was a kid and I learned to swim here at Bertley Pool. I've always had a love for the place,

00:28obviously really disappointed when the council closed it 18 months ago. I was one of the many

00:34volunteers who wanted to keep it open and we lost that fight but actually what we did manage to do

00:40was do an asset transfer to a charity which is Bertley Community Aquatic Centre which I'm the chair of

00:47and actually as a charity we've managed to reopen the doors and refurbish the slide and make the pool

00:54a community venue again where families can come and have fun. So the key things we had to do were

00:59a lot of work on the assets we had to replace the boilers the water storage units and the water

01:04heaters and that was the biggest piece of work we put some security measures on roller shutters and

01:11mesh grills and we also changed the lighting you can see it's very bright in here it's got new modern

01:17LED lights which are really efficient compared to the old ones so that was a big thing because it looks much

01:21better because of it but more interesting I think for people is this thing this water slide was not

01:27working it needed repair significant repair and refurbishment so we've done that as you can see

01:32it looks brand spanking new very popular with the kids so we got that up running again and another big

01:38thing we did was we invested in an inflatable obstacle course which the kids really like that that's

01:44very popular and we have that every weekend two sessions every weekend and all also during the

01:49holidays school holidays twice every day we currently have four segments and they're all in a row it's

01:53always the same so whilst it's very enjoyable it doesn't change we're trying to get another five

01:58segments so we can create a u-shape so there's two separate routes along the assault course but also

02:05we can change the arrangement when we do that so it won't always be the same so we think that would

02:08be a good way of attracting new customers but also keeping our existing ones because it's it's not

02:13always the same and it's it's bigger it's there's more things you can do on it um but that's costing

02:18us an awful lot of money and at the minute we've got a gap of around two and a half thousand pound

02:23that we need to fundraise for so as chair i've set up a go fund me page um which we're putting out

02:30through social media and on our website and we're asking people to just give us a donation as little

02:36as on as much as they can just to help us fund that gap and for us it's a real milestone because

02:42actually we've now been open six months and there's it's been quite a challenging time and

02:47there were times where we thought we might make it to six months but we have and these two holidays

02:53and all the family fun that's going on it's just really it's just it's the cherry on the top it's been

02:58really good