A NEW £7m swimming pool is set to be built in Blackbird Leys as the centrepiece of a major overhaul of the city’s leisure facilities.

The earlier idea of building an indoor water park with slides and a wave machine next to the leisure centre in Blackbird Leys has been dropped.

Instead the estate is to be home to a six-lane competition pool that would enable the closure of both the Temple Cowley pool and the existing pool at Blackbird Leys. The city council hopes the new pool could be built by 2013, or even 2012 to mark the London Olympics.

The complex is expected to contain a second pool featuring a ‘floating floor’, allowing the depth of the pool to be adjusted for learners, disabled swimmers or performance athletes.

City council leisure portfolio holder Bob Timbs said: “It is an exciting project.”

He said an indoor water park would have proved too costly to maintain. The idea of building a pool alongside a new Oxford ice rink facility was also found to be too expensive, he added.

The city council is hoping that a competition pool, to be attached to the existing Blackbird Leys leisure centre, will also attract substantial funding from Sport England and major trusts. It would also be partly funded from savings from the closure of Temple Cowley’s pool.

The new pool is part of an extensive package of proposals designed to give Oxford “world-class leisure facilities” which went before the city council’s executive board yesterday.

The regeneration scheme follows the council’s deal with Fusion Lifestyles, the trust that has been awarded a ten-year contract to manage the council’s leisure facilities. This has created opportunites to bid for funding that otherwise would not have been available.

Temple Cowley’s pool, where the ceiling is being held up with temporary scaffolding, is expected to remain open until the new Blackbird Leys pool is completed.

The council has seven leisure facilities managed under a contract with Fusion Lifestyle that runs until 2019, with an option to extend this for a further five years.

The report also reveals that Fusion is planning to install a £90,000 gym above Barton’s pool, in Waynflete Road. Building work could begin as early as March, opening next July. Councillors were told that the pool alone was failing to pull in enough visitors.

The outdoor Hinksey pool should see new investment, with the relining of the pool made a priority. Ferry Sport Centre, the city council’s busiest facility, which was refurbished in 2004/05, should see an extension of its gym.

The report also reveals that the city’s ice rink will need £1.65m investment over the next four years.

Plans to transform it into a major new leisure centre are to be dropped, with the report saying: “The idea of a combined ice rink with a leisure centre holds sound on environmental grounds due to the ability to utilise a combined heat power unit, yet the cost estimates, which are in the region of £30m and the requirement for a seven-acre site mean that such an aspiration is unlikely to be deliverable.”