London’s Sky Pool Lets You Swim Between Buildings 35 Meters Above the Street

Quick Facts: Name: Sky Pool. Location: Embassy Gardens, Nine Elms, London. Completed: 2021. Design: HAL (Hal Architects). Structure: A transparent acrylic swimming pool bridging two residential buildings at the 10th floor, 35 meters above ground. Length: 25 meters. Depth: Up to 3 meters at one end. Transparency: The pool floor and sides are fully transparent.

At 35 meters above South London, the Sky Pool at Embassy Gardens connects two residential towers with a transparent acrylic bridge that is also a swimming pool. Residents can swim from one building to the other. The pool floor and sides are fully clear. Everything below you — the street, the parked cars, the people who inevitably gather to look up — is visible through the water. It is not for everyone. It is extraordinary for everyone else.

The Engineering Behind It

The Sky Pool is made from a single piece of cast acrylic, the largest of its kind ever constructed. The pool walls are 200mm thick. Structurally, it spans the gap between the two buildings as a self-supporting bridge, carrying not just the weight of the water but the hydrodynamic forces of swimmers moving through it. The acrylic allows full visual transparency while meeting all structural safety requirements — a combination that, until recently, was not achievable at this scale.

What Swimming in It Actually Feels Like

Accounts from residents describe something between exhilarating and vertiginous. The transition from the covered pool deck to the transparent section happens gradually, and the moment when the solid floor beneath you becomes glass — and through that glass, London — is apparently something your brain takes a while to process. A good kind of a while.

Architecture That Makes People Feel Something

The best public architecture creates experiences that are impossible elsewhere. The Sky Pool doesn’t try to be civic or institutional. It’s a piece of luxury amenity that happens to be genuinely visionary in its engineering. The people who swim in it will remember it. The people who look up at it from Nine Elms Road will too.