I’m in a deep pond in East Anglia, fringed with lily pads, edged with trees. The sun is beginning to set, sending shafts of gold between the leaves. The water is dark, cool but not cold. It still retains, on this autumn day, the residual warmth of the summer months. The odd tendril of pondweed catches on my limbs as I loop in lazy breaststroke. So far, so normal, an outdoor swim like I’ve been doing for years.
Except this time, I’m not wearing anything.
I’m an enthusiastic outdoor swimmer, swimming throughout the year wherever I can find a body of water. Sea, river, lake, large pond, I’m not fussy.
But this naked stuff is new.
Okay, not completely new. Earlier experiences I’d firmly class as “skinny dipping” though. Stripping off, hot and sticky after dancing in the local nightclub, before running into the Indian Ocean near our beachside hotel in Madagascar. Or, with fellow students, shedding our formal attire and jumping, shrieking, into a university pool after the end-of-term dinner. Always in darkness, usually after a few drinks, most definitely as part of a group, egging each other on.
This, though, feels different. This is sober, in broad daylight, a reasoned and active choice. I’m kicking my way through the freshwater pool, no clinging costume between me and the water.
It started earlier this year. I was staying in France, with friends, a river five minutes’ walk away. I readily joined them in their tradition of swimming naked in the green water that was rushing down from the mountains. The first time? Because I’ll try most things once. But the second, third and beyond? Because I loved it. Yes, the cool river was soothing to my mosquito bites, and the mountain backdrop was nothing short of stunning, but it was more than that.
It isn’t helpful, particularly in the context of the climate crisis, to separate humans from nature – we are part of it, our futures are inextricably linked. But so often, behind our many screens, there’s a disconnect. Swimming outdoors has always broken down this barrier, and swimming naked did this in the most heightened of ways. And it was utterly freeing, too. Seeing these women with different body shapes entering the river uninhibited, I found my own body hang-ups diminished. One of our group commented that she saw all the things that she hated about her own body reflected back as beautiful when seen in others.
I’m not alone in loving it. There is a “new naturism” emerging amongst women across the country (though most would not define themselves as naturists), and when I reached out to the swimming networks I am part of to find out why, I was inundated with women with similar stories to mine.
Take Jen, the friend who introduced me to this. She’s 35, and a planning director for a London advertising firm. “It’s such a contrast from my daily life,” she says. “Which is offices, PowerPoints, being professional. It felt like a wild and liberating thing to do.” Gemma, 35, a Londoner who works in fashion, says naked swimming “brings [her] back to [her] primal self”, that “it is so healing… an antidote to the conditioning and constraints imposed by modern life”. Birmingham-based Sarah, 33, an executive coach and community engagement manager, has been naked swimming for five years. She finds it an “amazing, powerful experience… [one that] feels so freeing and natural”. It has, she says, “given me a lot more respect for my body, and what it can do”.
These motivations aren’t novel, or unexpected. We swim naked because it connects us more intensely to things: the water, the natural world, our bodies. But the simplicity of the motives doesn’t make the practice any less powerful. And as Rhia, 36, a holistic therapist in Norfolk who started naked swimming a couple of years ago says, there’s also an ecological factor too. It is “a way to reconnect to the earth”; after all, “we are water”. For her, in the context of a summer of sewage being emptied into our waters, there’s something vital about the physical act of putting one’s naked body into the sea, and, in doing so, demanding others be conscious of what they are dumping there. “We are part of a movement,” she says. “The stuff that they put into our waters is actually quite scary. It’s almost like we are calling people to be more mindful.”
So are these women bringing nudism into other aspects of their lives? Almost resoundingly no. I feel largely the same. While I’ve told a university friend I’ll join her in exploring some of the country’s nudist beaches, and agreed with Jen that participating in World Naked Gardening Day might be within our comfort zone, I certainly don’t see myself participating in naked bike rides across London in the future. Those feel too exposed, too public; there is too high a chance of making it onto gawking tourists’ social media feeds. But the naked swimming? I’m a convert. Nothing has made me feel more alive than floating completely naked in a river, water sliding over my skin. Indeed, with the winter months approaching, I might try cold water naked swimming next, nervous though I feel about the prospect of immersing my nude body in freezing water. And if something about my experiences makes you feel like you want to do the same, my advice is simple: with the caveats of “take someone you trust” and “do it somewhere you feel safe”, just go for it.
