Consultation on Future Access to the Hampstead Heath Bathing Ponds
Task
The City of London Corporation conducted a public consultation between 30th September and 25th November 2025 to gather views on future access arrangements at the Hampstead Heath Bathing Ponds. The consultation focused on possible changes at the Highgate Men's Pond and Kenwood Ladies' Pond following the 2025 Supreme Court judgment in For Women Scotland v The Scottish Ministers, which clarified the legal meanings of ‘man’, ‘woman’, and ‘sex’ under the Equality Act 2010.
Specifically, the consultation asked for views on whether the Ladies’ Pond and Men’s Pond should:
Continue operating as trans‑inclusive
Become exclusively single‑sex
Operate as mixed‑sex spaces.
Participants were then invited to comment on the range of options for how the facilities would operate in future. Demographic information was collected from all participants willing to provide it, including whether they used the ponds, how regularly they visited them, and standard census-style data. All responses were anonymous and handled in line with data protection requirements.
The City of London Corporation commissioned TONIC to produce a summary of responses to the consultation.
Our Approach
Quantitative analysis for all closed (multiple choice) responses was conducted, in addition to thematic analysis to summarise all written responses to open (free text) questions.
Thematic analysis followed a six step process, including:
A detailed reading of the data to become familiar with the text.
Initial codes that were manually ascribed to the data and organised into meaningful groups, relevant to consultation questions.
Codes conceptually related to one another were then grouped together and identified as themes.
Themes were reviewed to determine whether they were internally coherent and distinct from each other.
Defining and naming themes and subthemes, which provided structure to the analysis.
Writing up results, providing a narrative summary of the relationship between codes, subthemes and themes, including examples from the data to illustrate the essence of each theme.
Quality assurance was used across the team including sampling, inter-rater reliability, and controlling for bias.
Outcome
A total of 38,445 responses were received, with the majority submitted by members of the public. TONIC produced a report summarising the quantitative and qualitative analysis for each consultation question, in addition to a summary of focus group findings by the Centre for Consultation. A clear majority (86%) of respondents said the ponds should continue to operate as trans‑inclusive spaces, with trans-women using the Ladies’ Pond and trans-men using the Men’s Pond.
Read more about the consultation and summary of the findings: https://news.cityoflondon.gov.uk/consultation-results-published-on-hampstead-heath-bathing-ponds/
Full consultation report: https://www.cityoflondon.gov.uk/things-to-do/green-spaces/hampstead-heath/activities-at-hampstead-heath/swimming-at-hampstead-heath/hampstead-heath-bathing-ponds-consultation