The mystery of why so many Black Britons still cannot swim

At 27, BBC writer Florence Freeman is returning to a swimming pool for the first time in more than a decade. The chlorine smell makes her feel sick, but she joins a group of Black women learning at different levels, from confident swimmers to beginners trying to feel comfortable in the water.

Freeman describes learning to breathe properly, submerge her head and let the water carry her instead of fighting it. She says she is far from alone. Swim England figures based on a survey of 4,500 people show that swimming ability varies sharply across the population.

The figures published in 2022 suggest that 67% of Black women and 44% of Black men in England cannot swim 25 metres without assistance. The corresponding figures for white women and men are 17% and 12%. Poorer people, Muslims, people of South Asian descent and children known to social care also appear less likely to be able to swim.

The disparity has particular urgency after a record-breaking hot summer that brought deaths in lakes, rivers and at sea. The article says Black children and adults have been over-represented in drowning figures in previous years, along with several other groups with lower swimming ability. All children in Britain are supposed to leave primary school able to swim, yet the reasons for the gap in the Black community have remained only partly explained.

One persistent explanation is that Black people have denser bones than white people, making it harder to float. A 2023 study by the University of Portsmouth, the Royal National Lifeboat Institution and the Black Swimming Association concluded that everyone can float. The article also points to European accounts from the 15th century describing West Africans as skilled swimmers and divers, while racial exclusion from pools, particularly in the United States, helped create later assumptions that Black people were poor swimmers.

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Everyone can float.