Buckingham Pools embarked on the multi-million-pound development with Bouygues UK, the main contractor behind Pentre Awel, which will co-locate leisure, health, research, businesses and education in Llanelli, Wales.
As part of the local council’s ambition to bring together life science and community healthcare, Buckingham Pools was delighted to be awarded a comprehensive Design and Build contract for state-of-the-art wet leisure facilities to be delivered within Phase One of the scheme. The project was a joint winner in a hard-fought category for Commercial Pool Projects in the 2025 UK Pool & Spa Awards.
The 25m pool filtration system has been designed for 286,000 bathers per year, with the learner pool filtration system designed for 168,000 bathers per year and the NHS Hydro pool designed for 118,000 users per year.
Handed over in July 2025, the 25m pool structure was installed with reinforced sprayed concrete to BS EN 1992-3:2006 Eurocode 2. All pumps were mounted onto inertia bases and installed with flexible couplings to minimise vibration and noise from the pumps to the surrounding area.
The finishes to the pool are from the Agrob Buchtal Chroma Pool range supplied by Spectile. These include white glazed tiles to the walls, anti-slip tiles to the floor in the shallow water zone and white glazed in the deeper water, finger grips and ribbed backing tiles with integrated channel support span the overflow channel with HDPE channel gratings. Lane lines in the floor and wall targets are dark grey, as are the demarcation to the finger grip tiles and step edges.
COMPETITION SWIMS
As the pool is used for competitive swimming, starting blocks, turning boards, lane ropes, backstroke warning flags and false start flags are also installed. The pool has a fully electronic timing system installed for competitive swimming events using the Colorado system supplied by APG Leisure.
This includes timing pads to each swimming lane at the deep end of the pool and a 3.5m long and 2m high video and graphics screen that not only displays the times of swimmers but can show images and videos controlled by computer connected via fibre optic cables.
The pool has a fully independent, user controlled PoolPod disabled platform to allow disabled swimmers to lower themselves into the swimming pool without needed to wait until pool staff to assist them.
All pumps are mounted onto inertia bases and installed with flexible couplings to minimise vibration and noise from the pumps to the surrounding area. The heat exchanger is located in the air handling unit to benefit from additional heating from the heat losses.
Buckingham Pools
Tel. Phone: 01926 852351
E. info@buckinghampools.com
www.buckinghampools.com
