With his 2012 book, The A303: Highway to the Sun, the author and psychogeographer Tom Fort pulled on his driving gloves, got behind the wheel and took us on a journey down the royal road to the West Country and to la Grande Bretagne profonde.

Now, in this highly entertaining, informative new study – observant and lightly nostalgic in a similar way – he guides us round our lidos, the outdoor swimming pools which sprang up all over Britain in the 1920s and 1930s, designed and bankrolled by confident, imaginative local councils in the hardy fresh-air-and-fun enthusiasm of the time.

The lido is not sexy exactly, but it’s sensuous and even thrilling in its unique way

The lido is not sexy exactly, but it’s sensuous and even thrilling in its unique way

Lidos are far more interesting than boring old indoor pools, which are places for wimps and fainthearts who bottle out at the thought of swimming in the open air on a cloudy British midweek day. At the lido, you make a shivery, pigeon-toed walk from rudimentary changing facilities with your rolled towel under your arm, feeling the gritty municipal concrete under your bare feet and specks of rain on your goosepimply shoulders. You approach the shimmering, arctic-blue vastness of its depths, a colossal rectangle of water which in some cases extends almost to the horizon, with a single brown leaf floating there, or perhaps a line of........

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