‘It’s about the wellbeing of everyone in our community’
Twenty-five years ago, a grassroots campaign to save a much-loved bath house in a multicultural area of Glasgow sparked the creation of a pioneering community-based charity that is changing the lives of local residents. Journalist Melissa Sigodo tells the remarkable story of the Govanhill Baths Community Trust.
When a group of mothers chained themselves to cubicles at a historic Edwardian bath house in 2001, they didn’t think they would be sparking the longest consecutive running occupation of a public building in the UK.
In the most diverse residential area of Glasgow, south of the River Clyde, passionate members of the Govanhill community proceeded to spend 140 days fighting against the council’s proposed closure of the baths. They faced a violent stand-off with police on horseback but ultimately saved the beloved 100-year-old venue.
A quarter of a century since that freezing day in March ignited a movement, the ethos of a local campaign to defend the baths has become the heartbeat of an even more empowered community tackling food and climate injustice, racism and inequality.
‘All the communities that used it were able to negotiate their own space within the building’
Relying solely on walkie talkies and a local telephone booth to sneak people in and coordinate movements, the nearly five-month sit in was ‘tough but exhilarating’, says activist Fatima Uygun. She recalls the Govanhill Baths occupation as a decision that came naturally to the patrons who had heard about the planned closure.
The self-described socialist labelled the council’s move as a result of then-Prime Minister Tony Blair’s ‘neoliberal push to remove the concept of community’. But for a ‘Turkish girl’ who enjoyed the saunas provided by the historic venue and had adopted the long-standing Glaswegian tradition of occupying shipyards and public spaces, she and the multicultural Govanhill community couldn’t let the council take the facility away.
At 9pm on 21 March 2001, the Save Our Pool – Southside Against Closure Community Action Group, led by a group called Friends of Govanhill Baths, started a sit-in at the baths. It wasn’t simply about protecting personal pleasures at one of Glasgow’s largest swimming clubs; the core of the campaign was about saving a space that served a ‘quiet, hidden purpose’.
‘It wasn’t just affecting one demographic,’ says Fatima. ‘The kids’ swimming clubs and the parents were just outraged because they would have to take their kids miles and miles away. We had the Muslim men and the gay men who used the sauna as part of both their cultures, and they were outraged because they’d have nowhere else to go. Same with the women.
‘Asian women used the baths a lot because other than their home, there was nowhere else for [them] to socialise and meet one another. All the communities that used it were able to negotiate their own space within the building despite a lot of cultural, ethnic and religious differences. The closure was affecting a huge amount of people because that building had served the community for 100 years.
‘Parents, grandparents and so on had a history in that building. It wasn’t just about bricks and mortar, people met there, people fell in love there. It served a quiet hidden purpose that meant a lot to different communities.’
‘This was a real swimming experience in the heart of our community’
Occupants held a weekly musical vigil, while locals drove past donating money into a roadside bucket to help keep the sit-in alive. But towards the end of summer, on 7 August, mounted police from the regional force known then as Strathclyde moved in to evict the group while the council boarded up the building, preventing Friends of Govanhill from re-entering. With tensions rising, an evening protest on the same day turned violent, sparking calls for an inquiry into use of force by the police.
With the picket line destroyed, the end of the occupation left Fatima ‘heartbroken’. ‘It took them 18 hours to secure the building because we had people hidden everywhere,’ she says. ‘The police were exhausted – there were hundreds of [them]. When they smashed the windows and put security fences up, people went ballistic... After they smashed the picket line that was difficult. The day after we came back, to know that we didn’t have the building anymore – that was heartbreaking. But we came back, cleaned up the street and worked out a way to set up a charity.’
Following the community’s fierce determination to protect the baths, the Govanhill Baths Community Trust (GBCT) was born in 2004, with Fatima taking the position of treasurer and subsequently CEO. After years of back and forth with the council, GBCT was eventually able to take responsibility for running the building’s activities. However, the major renovation requirements for the venue meant the swimming facilities would remain closed.
Maariyah, a Pakistani-Scot working for GBCT, says the baths’ closure has affected a generation who lost out on the empowerment that came with the pools, particularly for Muslim women who require separate swimming spaces: ‘I learned how to swim at the Govanhill Baths. It was a part of my childhood. I just remember being told that that’s our last lesson and I was just very confused as a child.
‘I have nieces and nephews who don’t know how to swim. My best friend who is also Pakistani is so scared of water because she can’t swim. She was born around the time the baths were closing so she wasn’t old enough to start going to swimming lessons. This has always been a very diverse community, and we don’t have anywhere else that’s close by. This was a real swimming experience in the heart of our community. We weren’t a minority in that space. We were a majority in that space. I think that was very powerful.’
Indra who moved from Liverpool to Scotland and works alongside Maariyah says exercise is now seen as a ‘middle-class activity’ but that it should be accessible to all: ‘What Govanhill baths does as an organisation is saying everyone deserves well-being and activities.’
‘The influence of GBCT has spanned across the Glaswegian suburb’
After raising £9 million to renovate the building’s exterior, the process of refurbishing the interior has been hit with delays as a result of the pandemic, Brexit and the Russian invasion of Ukraine, which have affected the cost of materials. But the pragmatic charity found ways to make use of the space, hosting tours, workshops, fishing lessons, arts exhibitions and upcycling project Rags to Riches.
‘Once we were kicked out, we couldn’t get entry back in till 2012 so we were out in the wilderness for a long time,’ says Fatima. ‘We negotiated that with the council to be back in and to take over the foyer because it’s a whole street block. It’s a massive building with three pools. We ran yoga [and] wellbeing classes and that generated income.
‘We raised a quarter of a million pounds to refurbish the front, and we were in there till 2018 when we raised £9 million. But Covid hit and then it went downhill from there. We had the cost-of-living crisis, and we had the war with Russia and Ukraine, it caused the largest inflation in the building sector for nearly 80 years. All the money we had for the building just went to making the building wind and watertight. It was external refurbishment, so the inside is pretty much untouched.”
But while the baths remain closed, the influence of GBCT has spanned across the Glaswegian suburb, which is home to the largest Roma and minority ethnic community in Scotland. By creating numerous events and activities ranging from an anti-racism festival to pottery classes, GBCT has kept the spirit of social enterprise alive as the charity works to raise £10 million to complete the works.
‘We started the biggest anti-racist festival in Scotland called Scotting Hill,’ says Fatima. ‘We’re starting to do more and more things in the buildings and in the community. Heritage has always been important to us, so we set up an archive project. It’s also the 10th anniversary of Govanhill Ceramics. We’ve got a huge ceramics and pottery making, which is one of the biggest in Glasgow. We’ve got heritage tile-making.
‘We recycle local plastics and Glasgow’s Uniqlo now displays our plastics with furniture and textiles. That’s all collected local plastics that we create furniture from. All ordinary people making this stuff. As part of our wellbeing project, we’re planting 500 trees locally.’
'We’re doing that because we have to'
With the dozens of initiatives GBCT has launched, the charity also hosts a digital inclusion project to tackle digital poverty where residents receive basic courses to improve their tech skills. But as well as this, a local building transformed into a food shop known as the People’s Pantry was secured by the GBCT, allowing volunteers to support 494 families, as well as selling 83,335 meal portions in 2024-2025 alone, with food justice at the heart of their mission.
‘At the pantry you pay £5 and you get £30 pounds worth of shopping, so you still have to pay something, but what you get is subsidised.’ says Fatima. ‘That generates about £50,000 in income and the other £100,000 is grant funding. ‘We grow our own mushrooms – we have a community mushroom project called Community Champignons.’
‘We have the highest rate of child poverty in Scotland,’ she adds. ‘We want to help people with other [forms of] poverty that are impacting their food poverty which is electricity or living costs. So, all those people running the People’s Pantry are being empowered to also challenge other forms of oppression that are keeping them in a position of having to use the People’s Pantry.’
‘It’s not ideal. We are not a service provider. We’re doing that because we have to. I would rather give everyone £100 extra and they can decide how they want to spend their money. ‘It’s not just about the building, it never was. It’s about where that building sits within our community. It’s about the wellbeing of everyone in our community.’
‘Building collective power’
GBCT has been working with the Runnymede Trust and the New Economics Foundation’s Power to Prosper programme to address the causes of racialised poverty and build ‘collective power’. The three-year initiative aims to collaborate with local hubs, as well as support communities such as Govanhill to create change, with nearly £1 million granted to various groups making a tangible impact.
Power to Prosper has funded a community organiser role for GBCT, held by Maariyah, who is key in galvanising ideas and making them a reality. Currently, the charity is working on securing a youth centre to help keep teenagers out of trouble and take pressure off local authorities, as Glasgow has the highest rate of offending by young people in Scotland.
But all the essential projects the GBCT has brought to life stem from the ethos that led Fatima and others to stage the longest running occupation in the UK. It is the unshakeable belief that working class diverse communities deserve to have just as much access as ‘rich people’.
With Fatima’s determination to secure investment for the full refurbishment of the baths, she hopes the local community will seize the opportunity to learn to how swim – especially when 40 per cent of children in Scotland lack this vital life-skill.
‘We don’t think that’s expensive [to renovate the baths], we think it’s an investment,’ she says. ‘And if you go to so many working-class communities, a lot of the old buildings are being left to rot. We've been trying to get the government to understand the impact we’d have on the national health and social work. Working class communities deserve a history and a heritage. It’s not just rich people who should have beautiful historical buildings.’
Until the funding is secured, on the heels of celebrating the occupation's 25th anniversary, Fatima has her sights set on continuing to make an impact by empowering Govanhill residents. When the baths are finally reopened, which the charity head hopes will be soon, the community can close a quarter-of-a-century-long chapter and fully regain what they fought for to give to the next generation.
Learn more about Power to Prosper community hubs and how you can make a difference at powertoprosper.org/community-hubs.
The views and opinions expressed in this article are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect those of the Runnymede Trust.
Join the fight for racial justice: support the Runnymede Trust’s work by making a donation.
Photo © Govanhill Baths Community Trust
