about the project

"It was a choice to be like, no, no, I AM going to be one of those people who swims all year round. It's one of the most important things in my life."

For this ethnography I engaged four participants who choose to swim in Kenwood Ladies' Pond on Hampstead Heath during the coldest months of the year, when temperatures hover in the single digits.

The ladies' pond is an iconic London location, and cold water swimming is an intensely sensory pursuit - these connections to our ethnographic theme of London and the senses are straightforward. But the space's banning of photography and discouragement of phones initially seems one minimally mediated by the digital. It felt like a suitably challenging fieldsite in which to explore how digital anthropology can teach us something about how and why people swim in freezing cold water in this slice of wildness in the middle of London. I started my research with the following questions in mind:

What is the experience of swimming in the pond in winter - both sensory and beyond? In what ways is it mediated by the digital? How can digital anthropology provide insight into this experience in such an explicitly analogue space - and how can this be conveyed via this ethnography?

Cold water swimming can be broadly defined as swimming that takes place outside in unheated water during the winter season. Although this ethnography focusses specifically four participants' experience swimming at the ponds from January to April 2022 (alongside my own), when participants refer to cold water swimming more broadly this is generally what they mean.

PRESENTATION

If you've tried this link on your computer, you'll have noticed that this ethnography is only viewable on your phone. As I conducted my fieldwork it became clear that all participants’ interaction with the digital in relation to their cold water swimming practice was through their smartphones. I followed suit and decided to conduct all of my own data collection on my phone, from interview recording to audio and visual collection. This site is optimized for and only viewable on mobile, to close that loop. Photography and video is not allowed in the ponds itself, so throughout my presentation I have tried to convey the experience of swimming at the ponds through a number of means - audio, visual, artistic(?) - but the intensely personal experience of a pond swim means my participants' verbatim descriptions are at the centre of this ethnography.

PARTICIPANTS

I initially planned to centre the ethnography on a student swimming society that swims at the ponds, but through the course of my research realised my findings would be richer if the physical fieldsite was the thing that linked my participants as opposed to broader social connections. I started with a social media call out for London cold water swimmers, and from there narrowed down swimmers to a small group who focussed their swimming at the ladies' pond.

My participants became four women and non-binary people in their twenties and thirties. Most live within a 45 minute journey to the pond, one further afield. The variety of swimming experience varied; one is an experienced swimmer who had grown up by the sea, some swim widely in both built and wild environments, another only began cold water swimming during the pandemic. All were very excited to talk about swimming at the ponds in the winter, articulated their experiences incredibly clearly, and were a pleasure to spend time with.

METHODOLOGY

I spread my research out between mid January and mid April, 2022, through the means of:

Semi-structured interviews with participants initially built around three key themes: their relationship with swimming at the pond (and sometimes cold water swimming more broadly), sensory descriptions of a swim and the experience around it, and how they perceived technology and the digital fit into this. These were conducted both in person and, due to a prolonged bout of COVID at a crucial data-collection moment, over Zoom. All were recorded and transcribed through the app Otter.ai.
Participant observation: accompanying participants on swims in Kenwood Ladies’ Pond and discussing the experience before, during and afterwards.

A follow-up survey with some questions around the experience of the project and further details.
Multimedia content in the form of audio recordings of the environment, voice memos from participants (and myself), video and photo from around the experience, and some swimmers' own artistic representations.
Auto-ethnography. My own experiences of swimming at the pond are interspersed with my participants throughout my findings, and I've reflected on my own journey throughout.

A NOTE ON FINDINGS

As is evident in my findings section, I've centred these around the themes and subjects that my participants were most excited to speak about, and those that came up most often. Analysis and answers to the central questions I went in with appear throughout my findings, which do not need to be read in a particular order, but I pull together the main themes and observations in my conclusions section.

Dive in! Or rather: lower yourself gently, slowly and somewhat painfully in.