Above – Stourton –  Stewponey Lido. Real Photograph Postcard.

The Stewponey – with a famous Blackcountry Lido

One of the most famous pools in the Black Country was the Stewponey Lido, Stourton.

The Stewponey Lido was situated on the Stourbridge Road. It belonged to the Stewponey and Foley Arms Hotel which was visited by hundreds of people every year for almost three decades.

It was provided for the people of Stourton and Kinver and provided a facility for youngsters to have fun and swim with their friends. Also popular with Scuba Diving Clubs. An ideal facility with opportunity for training.

Quarry Bank resident Claude Harris, now aged 77 years, said he and his family had many fond memories of travelling to the lido and said for many people it was almost a trip to the seaside.

‘In those days it was very different as many people did not have cars and no buses ran directly to the lido Stourton’, he said.
‘In many ways it was like going on holiday. You had to plan the trip carefully and make sure you knew the times of the last buses so you could not be stranded many miles from home. Hundreds of people would go down during the warmer months and it really did have the atmosphere of going to the seaside. Our children Richard and Jackie absolutely loved it.’ Claude’s wife Betty said they would prepare a picnic before setting off.

‘There would be so much excitement and you could pick out the other families heading for the lido.,” she said. ‘You had to set out early in the morning to get all the buses but it added to the spirit of the day. The only trouble was that many of the children wanted to leave at the end of the day. There were certainly some tears.’
Both Mr and Mrs Harris said they had been upset when the lido had been destroyed to make way for new housing. “It is another little bit of shared history which has been chipped away. Things like the lido will never come again, you cannot recapture what those pools gave to the community,’ said Mrs Harris.

OUTCOME:  It remained popular until the late 1960’s. The axe fell on the lido site in the late sixties. It was empty and disused for 30 years or so in the early 2000s when the pool was filled in and the outer aspects demolished to make way for a new housing estate.The building line is very much changed now.

After the Stewponey closed, families moved further up the A449 to the Kingfisher Lido.

 

The green line is the original building line of the Stewponey Pub, and the blue rectangle represents the area of the Lido or there about