I worry that the special charm of the place will be lost if it becomes slick and modern, and, inevitably, more expensive.I like the Lido most about now, when I have returned home to the fading summer. There is certainly a broader cross-section of people than on most beaches, ranging from elderly regulars (some of whom carry on swimming through the winter) to teenagers who lie on the sunny side of the pool on hot days, to families who picnic on the grass, and single mothers who can’t afford to take their children away from home.There’s no better place for people-watching, for assessing the latest developments in the art of the tattoo, for deciding what one really thinks of body-piercing.There are plans to upgrade the Lido by means of a National Lottery grant, to introduce new training and restaurant facilities. If you swim for longer, you feel your muscles stretch and relax as your stroke settles into a steady rhythm; in conventional pools, the main marker is the turn at each end.Even on a hot Bank Holiday when there might be 2,000 people in its grounds, the sounds are muffled or dissipate into thin air, and you are left alone with the great sky above you.Built in two months flat in 1906, by a team of unemployed men under the inspirational leadership of a local vicar, the Lido retains the atmosphere of a rare social experiment that worked. “I find it very exciting,” said the Reverend, taking in the scene through his bifocals as the wind whipped his explorer trousers.Rev Tom Devonshire Jones was “not really surprised” at the lack of funding for the Spirit Zone, given its theme: “It’s very poignant It requires the greatest wisdom and insight to encompass it. SOMETIMES I’M not sure why I go away in the summer – habit, I suppose, and a feeling that the children expect it – when my idea of perfection is only 10 minutes from home. I have been to places generally regarded as tropical paradises – Tahiti, Fiji, the Great Barrier Reef – but my Eden is an open-air swimming pool in south London. Every time I click through the ancient turnstile entrance to Tooting Bec Lido, my heart soars at the expanse of water in front of me, as it does when I crest a hill on a coastal road and suddenly see a great spread of sea.

The sheer scale of the Lido takes the breath away: 100 by 30 yards; it is the largest swimming pool in London, holding a million gallons of crystal clear water.
This scale subtly changes the experience of swimming, for each length seems like a journey across open water. God is one who is not dismayed by changes in scale.”As the wind intensified, my solicitous Reverend was most concerned that I was cold My every enquiry was met by one of his own. If I had been a Jane Austen protagonist, I would have wanted to marry him by now.”Churches need to sit up,” he explained, gazing at the carbuncle. “Historically we’ve always needed to be reformed and revitalised and given a kick up the backside, or whatever it may be.”More used to giving art slide shows to parishioners than being photographed in Docklands, my Oxford-educated clergyman leapt on to the DLR, raced up escalators and said that he had thoroughly enjoyed his day out.Frankly, he was more in touch than your average rapper. I felt like a roving evangelist in hope of succour, or a wannabe priestess monitoring his pastoral activities. I was almost moved to dress in calf-length navy needlecord and offer to do the flowers.Well, almost.. Give them my phone number.”Clutching his umbrella on a windy platform as trains sped in from Canary Wharf, Devonshire Jones was calm in the face of religious indifference in secular times: “I think spiritual matters need to be spoken about in a rather small-scale, homely way, and I’m not sure that they lend themselves to large- scale pronouncements I think there isn’t a slick new method The scale is immaterial to the believing.

It has to do with the things you can’t see and which are implanted in us very deeply and which are of utter importance, but are very often repressed or swept under the carpet – things like our long destination, our hope, our death, our longings.”As a director of the Art and Christianity Enquiry, a body concerned with “the arts as they intersect with religious belief and with theology”, Devonshire Jones would recommend the use of interactive and more traditional art to convey spiritual or amorphous ideas: “It’s the arts that enable societies to articulate some of these more awkward factors in our existence.”In fact, when confronted by what appears to be a UFO in a building site, the sort of vicar who’d make a splendid Eton chaplain claims: “If they ring for help for the Spirit Zone, I’ll be along there. The hallway of Tom Devonshire Jones’s towering Primrose Hill house features a clutter of crow-like umbrellas and a floppy cotton sunhat next to a large bag of elastic bands Patrician fogey vowels greeted me. “There was more happening than her assessing the accused.” You can say that again. Police have since revealed that Gill, who was out on bail and therefore free to come and go, met Guess a number of times before a fully-fledged affair began.You don’t need to be a regular viewer of LA Law to know that communication, let alone sex, between jurors and defendants is hardly encouraged by the courts.When the verdict came down, Gill was acquitted.

Prosecutors and police, who had suspected for some time that the juror and the suspect were having an affair, immediately began tailing the couple. Police recorded an incredible 18,000 phone calls and numerous sexual encounters – reportedly more exciting than Guess’s account of the initial liaison.When she was confronted, Guess admitted she had fallen in love with Gill – swept up, she said, on a tide of emotion, even though Gill was actually nothing like the fantasy she envisioned. Nor would the earnest, East End juniors equipped with a sense of the community and cultivated glottal stops. No – as a pagan heretic with a love of Victorian novels, I wanted a proper type of vicar to accompany me to the Far Eastern reaches of London.Finally, I found the Reverend Tom Devonshire Jones, aged 64, vicar of St Mark’s, Regent’s Park “I may not be your man I’m a bit sort of… What does a simple man of the cloth have to say on the matter? How does he feel when he is confronted by the theme-parked wasteland that is the Dome after the gentler rhythms of his leafy parish?In search of a basic vicar to consult on millennial matters, I was offered a series of eager youngsters who wear jeans This would not do. “You can fun me up a bit if you like.” In fact, he was so lovely, so movingly game for any surprise the 21st century might throw his way, that I’d have turned down Thomas Becket for the job if he had dropped into my office.At first I thought I was about to spend the morning with a rabid old dodderer who would view Millennium Domes as monstrous carbuncles.