The leaky swimming pool in the Consett municipal leisure centre in Durham has been fixed by relining it with stainless steel.
The pool was closed for safety reasons two years ago by Durham County Council, which became aware of significant technical issues when it took over the management of the centre in 2018. The finishes to the pool tanks and surrounds were failing, resulting in tiles cracking and coming away from the walls – as well as significant leaks and water loss.
Consett Leisure Centre only opened in 2015. It was built by Carillion, which would have been contractually obliged to fix the leaks had it not gone out of business in January 2018.
In 2021 the council appointed Alliance Leisure under the UK Leisure Framework to lead the remediation works.
In a UK first, the entire main pool was relined with a stainless steel tank that was prefabricated off-site. The system, called RenovAction, is supplied by Italian company Myrtha Pools as a modular engineered pool repair method without any significant demolition. Installed on top of the existing tiles, the tank provides a complete waterproof solution and, according to Alliance Leisure, was more cost effective than replacing the tiles. New finishes were also applied to Consett Leisure Centre’s smaller pool and splash play area.
Scheduled to take up to 12 months to complete owing to the extensive nature of the defects, the works were completed in just six months. The swimming pool reopened to the public in July 2022.
Sean Nolan, business development manager at Alliance Leisure, said: “Bringing Consett swimming pool back into public use has been an extremely challenging project. The works were complex due to working within and around existing infrastructure that had either failed or was of a poor standard. The team had to be flexible in their approach to ensure the solution, which has never been performed in the UK before, was correctly installed and worked effectively. The result is a revitalised swimming pool that the public can enjoy for years to come.”
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