The Active Places database, which is held by Sport England is the most powerful dataset available in the country for comparing sporting facilities. I’m quite keen on getting my hands on the data, but at the moment I’m not quite sure how I’d go about doing that.

However, if in doubt, Google. While idly watching telly this evening I ended up going on one of my wild Google goose chases for information about swimming. Occasionally I find something interesting, but most of the time I draw a blank.

However, on this occasion I managed to come across a very interesting report into swimming statistics, using the Active Places database. In the report there are lots of interesting tables, including one comparing the total swimming pool surface area (that’s the total surface area for each public pool) with the population for each region of England. I copied the data into a spreadsheet and then pasted it into Many Eyes, so I could make a map of the stats.

Maybe this doesn’t look so impressive, but what it shows – very clearly – is the West Midlands is the worst region for swimming pool provision. I’m going to look at this in more detail as soon as possible, but wanted to make the map available straight away.