Skip to content

Campus Pool Skate Park

How an unused swimming pool in Bristol has been transformed into a skate park.

Name of project / organisation

Campus Pool Skate Park

Size and date of award

£75,000

Sport / activity

Other

Campus started with its two directors, Andre Seidel and Tim Nokes, providing portable skate ramps at a Saturday youth club they ran for Bristol Council. They could see there was a need for some alternative youth work and positive results from trial sessions run at a Pupil Referral Unit showed what skateboarding could achieve. 

As well as serving to support their youth work, Andre and Tim knew there was also a strong business case for increasing the availability of skateboarding facilities in their area. Bristol’s one existing skatepark at the time operated predominantly as a nightclub, and was failing to meet local demand. 

A young man enjoying the skate park

In 2011, Campus ran its first stand-alone skatepark out of a rented art-space in Bristol. They soon found that the building, which they described as a ‘squat-like’ warehouse, wasn’t suited to its purpose.

Andre and Tim first enquired about the disused swimming pool in 2012 after seeing it being advertised on the council's website. At the same time a local councillor, Richard Eddy, was gathering a 10,000-strong petition to stop the community from losing use of the site and to mobilise local people to redevelop it into something else.

The Campus directors undertook an extensive two-year community consultation. It was largely thanks to this, support from the local authority and Councillor Eddy’s advice and backing, that Campus’ community asset transfer and planning application were successful.

Campus Pool opened in July 2015, having used £80,000 from Big Issue Invest to convert the building. Subsequently, funding from us made it possible to add a community café. This has "drastically improved the business" and income from the cafe now exceeds that from the skatepark and shop.

To find out more about the project, please click the link below. 

Sign up to our newsletter

You can find out exactly how we'll look after your personal data, but rest assured we’ll only use it to make sure you receive our newsletter, to understand how you interact with our newsletter, and to provide administrative information about our newsletter.