I don't think that they are that hard up but the Council must square the budget on pools that as everyone knows are not cheap to build and to run.

The Bridge is not ideally located and is rather small, but it's currently an important facility for many. The problem is that its presence had been used in the past as an argument to shut down Forest Hill Pools and the current policy of 5 pools for the borough (a policy only introduced in 2005) is the great victory of the years of campaigning of the Friends of Forest Hill Pools.
Now I don't think that it would be possible to envisage the Bridge as a substitute for FHP, because its catchment area leaves too many (former) users of FHP out, but you can surely see how moving FHP closer to it opens up to an argument that the Bridge is redundant and having 4 instead of 5 pools means a lot of revenue budget savings. And as the Council must shave ?10m off its revenue budget each year then it would be only a matter of time before it closes.

So, if FHP has to move to a site that would mean closure for the Bridge then let's face reality and let's open the debate that the sale of the FHP site and the potential savings generated by the likely closure of the Bridge means that a much better spec facility could be affordable and that maybe 4 good pools are better than 5 of which two have a largely overlapping catchment area and of these two one is a small pool in the back of beyond and the other is a basic one stuck in a backstreet.
And I think that it's better to have this debate because the way things are going it's likely that we'll end up 4 pools instead of 5 anyway, whether we want it of not.
And if 5 smaller ones are better then the Council must recommit to it in the light of the new arrangement.