If you're new to wild swimming then you need to know how to stay safe in open water. During the first heatwave of every summer people rush to cool off in the nearest open water, a phenomenon that’s ...

The “wild swimming” trend — aka open-water swimming, or taking dips in lakes, rivers, streams or even the sea — isn't exactly new. Still, it has been increasing in popularity over the past decade, ...

Wild swimming has grown massively in popularity in recent times. Not only is swimming outdoors a pleasant way to enjoy the sunshine, fresh air and green leafy surroundings, it can also help to relieve ...

Preparing to jump out of the second-floor window and into the river below, I felt the acute sense that my anxiety was about to be washed away. It was a balmy July day in perhaps the most ...

It was nostalgia, not a desire to clear my head that first drew me to outdoor swimming in my 30s. I’d grown up close to water and spent my childhood at the beach, neck deep in the North Sea. The ...

Members of the Bluetits Chill Swimmers head into the sea for a cold dip. Photo Credit: Courtesy of The Bluetits Chill Swimmers Jumping into a frigid lake, pond or ocean may not appeal to everyone, but ...

As warmer weather returns so do the attractions of an outdoor dip. Its revitalising power, even when conditions are more bracing, has helped fuel a British craze for “wild swimming”. Now though, after ...

For years now I’ve been haunted by salad. Not by triffid-like radicchio at my window, or the coiled green caterpillar I once found at the heart of a lettuce, but by packets of wild rocket. What ...

Primrose Freestone, senior lecturer in clinical microbiology at the University of Leicester looks at the growing trend of wild swimmining and whether fears of germs and unwanted bacteria are founded.