Over the past few weeks we’ve held a series of events to celebrate the opening of our exhibition, ‘Common Waters: An Exploration of Social Bathing’.

In September we welcomed the public to our London studio as part of Open House Festival where we launched the exhibition, co-curated by Jane Withers Studio. The exhibition illustrates the history, revival and future of social bathing in the UK through archival photography, drawings, objects and publications. Works on display consider the bathhouse not simply as a place of hygiene or recreation, but as a civic space; somewhere to meet, pause, recover and experience water collectively.

At the centre of the exhibition is a new bathhouse proposal for Bankside, London, by Tuckey Design Studio, developed with Jane Withers Studio. The project asks what a permanent publicly operated bathhouse might mean in a city where access to water is increasingly shaped by climate change and the pressures of urban life. It proposes bathing as a form of shared infrastructure, one that can support physical, spiritual and social well-being while creating new relationships with the city and its waterways. The illustration to this project was recently on display at the Royal Academy Summer Exhibition.

Following the exhibition opening, we hosted a panel talk in mid-October as part of our Building on the Built lecture series. Tuckey Design Studio Director Jonathan Tuckey chaired the panel, which featured Jane Withers (bathhouse expert), Gabrielle Reason (sauna expert) and Chris-Romer Lee (wild swimming expert).