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    'Wild swimming'? We used to just call it swimming | Rhiannon Lucy Cosslett

    Don’t get me wrong, I love outdoor bathing – but I object to its appropriation by a privileged urban elite
    by Rhiannon Lucy Cosslett Jan 29, 2020 5 minutes
    ‘Sea swimming is a way of communing with a planet that is dying, of feeling part of the whole.’ Wild swimmers in Whitby, Yorkshire. Photograph: Ian Forsyth/Getty Images

    The romantic poets – Coleridge, Byron, Keats – loved to swim. Swimming in open water offered the opportunity to connect with nature, nourish creativity, garner spiritual inspiration and experience the sublime. Their obsession was called hydromania, and it’s back. “Wild swimming”, as it is now known, is growing in popularity across the UK. It is increasingly featured in the press and on social media, often coupled with intensely romantic language. In publishing, memoirs about swimming and its ability to heal addiction and mental health problems have become their own niche genre.

    This, together with a boom in nature writing, a new trend for “forest bathing”, a general obsession with going “off grid” and internet-free retreats, and the introduction of a new natural history GCSE, all seems to indicate an increased popular engagement

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