Prince Alfred Park Pool

You’d think this was the only pool in the area. After about 6pm it’s not even worth attending to swim laps.
Thats unless you like sharing a lane with 20 other people who seem incapable of determining if they’re a slow, medium or fast lane swimmer.
Yep, you can bet the slow lane is packed with heroes lapping the 70-​year-​old grandma and the fast lane is full of idiots vastly overestimating their breaststroke capabilities.
It’s shame really, because it’s a great facility in the middle of what has become a nice park. Just not worth going in summer for an after work lap session.
Also no real kiosk means you’ll be trekking to a nearby corner store for the mandatory ice cream and chips after a long day at the pool.

El Dorado, the Lost City of Gold, exists, and it’s right there in plain sight, right next to Central station and just down the road from every damned hipster bar and coffee shop worth caring about.
What the hell am I talking about? Prince Alfred Pool is what I’m talking about. No, not talking. Gushing, in strictly the non-​chatroom sense. I always thought this was a scummy hobo park littered with needles and broken dreams. But I took a punt on a friends advice and hit this pool up for an afternoon swim and I stand before you a changed man.
Firstly, it’s free until November. Nada, nix, bupkiss. Secondly, it’s a hella nice pool, with clean, clear water, lotsa lanes, and — the best — a huge slope of grassy wonderland for sunbaking and, sure, perving, because why not? There’s a big wooden deck under a tree, umbrellas, a café, and state of the art changerooms.
We even smuggled a bottle of wine in and got a little sozzled in the sun. Fine a lot sozzled. What a day though. I particularly enjoyed the city workers who busted out the budgie smugglers and were sprawling out in the sun while getting through a fat stack of reports. Now that’s how you read, son. That’s how you read.

Great pool right next to Central Station, full length 50m, open all year and heated in winter. It’s good that it’s been reopened after being closed for several years while it was rebuilt. A great addition to Sydney’s array of swimming pools.

They’ve finished building it, and it’s beautiful. This is an outdoor Council pool set within the landscape at Prince Alfred Park, near Central Station. It’s a great design: grassy hills, big yellow sun umbrellas, with detailing in dark wood and swimming-​pool blue.
There’s not that much to it: a 50m pool and a café, change rooms, lockers, and little fountain thing for toddlers to run around in. It’s highly green rated: sustainable materials, tri-​gen energy, water recycling. The pool is clean and heated (though not too too hot). Suitable for wintertime laps, though getting out of the pool is the unpleasant bit. Today I was a bit unimpressed with people’s pool etiquette (the slow lane is not for standing around in with your boyfriend, it’s for swimming, morons — and a few stray legs from the play lane heading into the lap lanes, hmph), but I guess that’s life in a public pool. It has the standard fast, medium, slow, and leisure lanes and mostly people understand what that means.
I’m pretty thrilled that I had a swim in late May, and lay around in the sun. Go Sydney. Go Prince Alfred Park. And the best bit: it’s free for the first 6 months! (Until some time in November 2013…)