THE OASIS
Sometimes, when I contemplate the bardo transition from this life to the next, I find myself, for some random reason, thinking of the three iconic water slides at Swindon’s Oasis, a wonderland of pool nirvana for us kids back in the day. It was a place where we felt briefly immortal as we hurtled down The Screamer, The Great White, and The Sidewinder toward our uncertain fate.
The Spoonster Spouts articulated brilliantly in his nostalgic blog the thrill of the slides and the chlorine-soaked courage we all needed to make our descent down through them.
The Domebusters were terrifying. Just to get to the slides, you had to negotiate a dark cave where witches cackled and cobwebs clung, and elaborate glow in the dark hieroglyphics tried to communicate their warnings from across history. You then had to negotiate a series of stairways to get to the full height of these elaborate winding tunnels and the inevitable queues.
Each slide was graded based on the danger it posed to your health. Some you could take headfirst, others sitting down. You had to wait behind your choice of slide with a coloured mat in your clammy hands until the light turned to green and a spotty teen gave you the nod. Over the course of 100 metres, there were vertical drops, sharp bends, and the mind-blowing experience of speeding headfirst into translucent light and the unknown.
The thing that we all feared though was not in the design of the water slides, but born from the twisted minds of Swindon’s lost children. There was the very real threat that the kid in front of you would suddenly spread-eagle themselves mid-way down the slide, coming to a halt. As the water rushed beneath them, they would remove a mound of Hubba Bubba from their mouths and a razorblade from their trunks and afix it to the bottom of the slide. They would continue down the slide until the next kid came whizzing down to be sliced to shreds.
If the razorblades didn’t get you, the fibreglass joins were enough to raise red welts on skinny limbs. If you managed to avoid injury within the slide, then you were guaranteed to get karate kicked in the neck at the bottom of the tube as you gathered yourself and adjusted your dignity before emerging from the danger zone.
The Domebusters left their mark on all who rode them. Up until my early twenties, I had recurring dreams or segments of dreams where I would suddenly find myself plunged into a cylindrical tube, whooshed away to some other non-sequitur.
I can confirm from my own experience that there was a genuine sense of facing your fears, real and imagined, all on your own as you entered those green, white, and blue watery portals, otherwise known as Domebusters, hoping you’d come through the other side without getting stuck or thwacked in the back by someone sliding into you. Even worse was getting snagged on those unforgiving rivets in the fibreglass sections of the slides themselves. One of the slides (I don’t remember which) used to pause the flow of water momentarily, leaving you anxious about whether it would return before a final swoosh sent you down through the chutes into the big pool—a kind of instant rebirth—where you were greeted by ecstatic fellow survivors of the experience.
In addition to the main attraction of the three slides, there was the wave machine in the main pool, which would be stopped and started at various intervals, causing great excitement among us all. It made us feel as if we were living our own version of The Goonies, Jaws, or some other perilous sea adventure movie—the closest any of us could get to living out the fictional fantasies we saw on the cinema screen or on our VHS machines back home.
The Spoonster further recalled:
You could swim through the waves like Casey Jean Parker or Mitch Buchannon, crashing through the surf to save a drowning babber from Bassett. Alternatively, you could swim out to the far-left corner of the pool and tuck your toes under the rail, lying back as the waves buoyed you rhythmically beneath the fronds of palm trees.
The ultimate cause for celebration on a friend’s birthday was when a trip to The Oasis was added to mark the occasion, or on those rare school trips that took us back to the futuristic-looking indoor water park, which always prompted great joy among us. The foreboding, Nordic-horror-like pool at our own school—much colder and more formal—was quite the opposite of the fun and thrills provided by the heavenly Oasis in Swindon, where one could easily forget the desire to visit a real beach or swim in the ocean, so comprehensive were its aquatic delights.
We even had different coloured rubber wristbands to determine how long we could stay in for our Swindon session (which always seemed far too short) and to access our lockers afterwards. Each colour assigned to our group was like a different army battalion, bonded together by a shared moment of time at The Oasis—forever etched into our memories.
It was only recently, while reading in the Architectural Journal about the current setbacks in the new application for a re-vamp of the Oasis in Swindon, that I began to appreciate the legendary impression it left on the collective consciousness of kids growing up in the 1980s and 1990s.
Not only was it where Liam Gallagher came up with the name for him and his brother's rock group but it was also a place where an array of events and occasions were enjoyed from concerts to restaurants to sporting events.
Back to The Spooner for further expounding:
The Oasis contained everything imaginable beneath its futuristic 45 ft high dome and sprawling subterranean spaces. The vanguard in a great swath of pioneering 1970’s leisure centres, it housed a swimming pool, a water park, a sports centre, a snooker hall, a concert venue, an arcade, a restaurant and bar. It housed the full-size snooker tables where my dad taught me how to hold a cue and lose 397 times in a row. It was where I attended Glenn Hoddle’s soccer school and graduated with flying colours and a signed certificate. It was where I bought Guns ‘n Roses bootleg CDs for extortionate fees at the local Record Fairs. It was where I swam, snogged, snacked, smashed, scored, slipped and slide tackled away the best hours of the best years of my life.
At the age of sixteen, I started English Literature at college. When the lecturer read the class Kubla Khan by Coleridge, my only frame of reference for a ‘stately pleasure-dome’ was the Oasis leisure centre. The tripped-out vision of a poet is what the Oasis was and will always be to me.
Not much more to add to that brilliant summation of Swindon’s natatorium 'Xanadu', except to say that I’m tempted to go and write a Fast Times at Ridgemont High/Goonies/Ferris Bueller-style movie about a day at The Oasis, to recreate those memories in the kind of kids’/teen comedy genre that seems most appropriate to the spirit of that magnificent cathedral of fun.
Could even get Oasis to do the theme tune.
Slide away.
Tom Spooner