Text 1: Splash as Harnley Lido reopens after eleven years, by Rachel Denby

An original contemporary newspaper article.

At seven o’clock yesterday morning, eleven years after its gates were chained shut, Harnley Lido opened again, and a queue of swimmers stretched halfway down Mill Lane to greet it.

The 1930s pool closed in 2013 when the council said it could no longer afford repairs to the cracked basin. A group of local parents, the Friends of Harnley Lido, refused to let it go. They raised £1.4 million through grants, sponsored swims and a long-running cake stall, and volunteers have spent two winters scraping and repainting the changing cabins.

For many residents the reopening is about more than nostalgia. Campaign chair Denise Ekwueme pointed out that around a third of the town’s children leave primary school unable to swim twenty-five metres. ‘The nearest indoor pool is a forty-minute bus ride away,’ she said. ‘Families simply weren’t going. Now every school in Harnley can walk its pupils here.’

The pool is heated to 24 degrees and will open all year round. Free sessions are planned for under-elevens during the summer holidays.

Among the first in the water was 81-year-old Malcolm Vey, who learned to swim at the lido as a boy. ‘My knees won’t let me walk far these days,’ he said, ‘but in the water I feel thirty. I’ve missed my friends here more than the swimming.’

Text 2: Opening of the new public baths, by A Correspondent

An original newspaper report written in a nineteenth-century voice; a period simulation, not an archival document.

In this newspaper report from 1868, a journalist describes the opening of public baths in a northern mill town.

The new Public Baths in Garside Street were opened on Monday by the Mayor, in the presence of a large and respectable company, and by the evening upwards of four hundred persons had made use of them.

It is no secret that the want of such an establishment has long been felt in this town. A working man who returns from the mill or the foundry black from head to foot has had, until now, no means of washing himself save a bucket in a crowded yard. In the summer months the lads of the district have been accustomed to bathe in the canal, and not a season passes without one or two of them being drawn out drowned. The surgeon to the Infirmary, who spoke at the opening, declared his belief that dirt was the friend of fever, and that the baths would save more lives in this town than any physic he could prescribe.

The building contains a swimming bath of seventy feet in length, thirty private baths, and a wash-house in which women may launder their family’s linen at a charge of one penny an hour, instead of drying it before the single fire of a crowded room. A second-class bath may be had for twopence, which brings it within the reach of the poorest labourer.

We understand that a swimming master will attend on Saturday afternoons to instruct boys free of charge.

Using information from both texts, explain briefly why the swimming baths mattered to local people.

You should make it clear which text you are referring to.