When Sadie Clayton attended her first adult swimming lesson at the age of 31, she immediately noticed things she and her fellow classmates had in common. Everyone wanted to hold onto the ledge. Everyone had a reliance on flotation devices. And everyone was a person of colour. “There were six of us, and we were all Black and brown,” she remembers. “I was like, ‘Hang on, what’s going on here?’” Clayton, a London-based artist and TV presenter, imagined she was part of a minority of grown adults fearful of even putting their faces into water, let alone swimming in it. In a broad sense, she was right. In 2016, 88 per cent of British adults said they could swim. But Clayton was also part of a very different majority of people: as of 2022, 95 per cent of Black adults and 80 per cent of Black children in the UK do not swim.
“I’d heard the myth that Black people don’t swim before,” she tells me. “‘Of course I don’t swim, I’m Black’ – it’s like a kind of running joke.” But after noting how many Black people were in her lessons, as well as the social media followers sending her the most encouragement when she posted about being in the water, Clayton was intrigued to find out more. “I started doing my research and I found out how massive that gap is. It’s more than just me, or my Jamaican grandma, or a few of my followers – there’s a real trend here.”
