Between getting off the train at Herne Hill and passing through the iron gates of Brockwell Lido, London ceases to feel like a strange place. Before you see it, you hear it: women yelling at one another from opposite ends of a Victorian outdoor pool, laughter the splash of cold water. It’s only a matter of time if you haven’t heard of Girly Dips yet.
The club didn’t begin with a brand deck or a business plan. A neck injury left Lowri Jones, a competitive swimmer who had finished the English Channel with a relay team, paralyzed and quietly collapsing. She used to swim four or five times a week with a team, but now she only swims alone.
The loneliness was more taxing on her than the injury itself. She couldn’t find a group of casual cold-water swimsuits in London. She then asked if anyone would like to join her in a post on Instagram. There were two women present. After swimming, they went to brunch and chatted for probably longer than anyone had anticipated. That was in May of 2024. Girly Dips started there.
Until the summer, when over sixty women gathered at Beckenham Place Park Lake for an evening of yoga, swimming sunshine, it’s possible that Lowri didn’t fully believe what she was building. At that point, the club had a growing Instagram following, a WhatsApp group a reputation for making everyone who entered the gate feel like they were expected. As the community has grown, Lowri’s statement, “We received regular feedback that our dips are welcoming and fun”, seems like a profound understatement.
There are currently over 5,000 members of Girly Dips, with ages ranging from 22 to well into their seventies. According to most accounts, people are most surprised by this generational mix. No matter how old you are or how many Channel swims you’ve completed, there seems to be an odd equalizing quality to cold water. Women who have never taken a cold dip stand next to each other; the only true difference is that one of them is going to make a discovery.”Where and How to Join”
The club meets mostly at Brockwell Lido in Herne Hill, South London, which is one of the most popular outdoor pools in the city and a suitable location for a community based on warmth and openness. Additionally, sessions are held at lakes and other open water locations throughout the city, such as Beckenham Place Park Lake. Meetings take place one or two times a month, which feels deliberate because each session is an event rather than a routine people seem to attend in accordance with that.
Instagram is the easiest way to join. The club is active at “#@girlydips”, where new members can get a sense of the community before coming and upcoming dips are announced. A WhatsApp group is also available for daily communication, swimming advice casual plans in between scheduled sessions. Every event has a capacity cap for safety reasons lifeguard ratios and briefings are held prior to each dip to ensure that no one is physically or figuratively out of their depth.
The ability to swim is not a prerequisite. No requirements for fitness or size. The club’s stated goal is to use cold water swimming to unite women, but it’s still unclear if swimming is actually the goal or if it’s just the greatest way to get sixty strangers together in a lake and become friends. Most likely both. It works either way. When Lowri wrote that first Instagram post, she never quite imagined that women would show up on their own and depart with plans for dinner and holidays.
It’s difficult to ignore the fact that London has a loneliness issue that is specific to its size and pace rather than being unique to it. Girly Dips appears to have discovered almost unintentionally that the cold is a powerful social equalizer. When they are about to enter an outdoor pool in the British weather, no one is performing. That has a subtly radical quality.
i) https://londontheinside.com/girly-dips-is-the-swim-club-uniting-women-across-generations/
ii) https://pocketmags.com/outdoorswimmer-magazine/december-25/articles/girly-dips-joyful-community
iii) https://swimpeeps.com/blogs/news-musings/4-swim-day-trips-london