Innovation After Hours: Swimmable Cities

Looking for fresh inspiration, new perspectives, and interesting people to meet? Join The Thomas J. Moran Graduate School & Planning at Queen's for Innovation After Hours: Swimmable Cities. This Global Entreprenurship Week we are bringing you a relaxed evening designed to get you thinking differently about your future. The speaker for this session is Chris Romer-Lee. Chris Romer-Lee is a designer, researcher and advocate for swim sites across the world, he connects people to water. He’s been a swimmer for as long as he can remember. As co-founder of architecture practice Studio Octopi, he developed a portfolio of pools, baths and swim-site strategy alongside projects on dry land. In 2025 he set up his own consultancy, focused on getting more people swimming and improving access to water. He works with organisations to design and refurbish lidos, baths and bathing places, and has become an expert in urban swimming and tidal pools. In 2023 his book ‘Sea Pools’ was published by Batsford and is a bestseller. Chris’s research and writing work demonstrates how such swim sites can become a focus for healthy communities and improved ecologies. Through collaboration with government bodies, he advocates for better access to swim sites of all kinds. He co-founded two activist led groups, Swimmable Cities (global) and Future Lidos (UK). In 2025 the Mayor of London and the Mayor of Paris both signed the Swimmable Cities Charter. Lecture: Join Chris on an aquatic narrative, a journey that started in 2012 with an evocative vision of a floating pool in the River Thames. He will guide us through his speculative and realised projects, both architectural and literary. As a voluble evangelist for swimming, he will argue we have a right to swim in our towns & cities and that swimming facilities are essential social infrastructure for our futures. The event will open at 5pm, with food and drinks provided. The speaker will begin at 5.30pm