How have I been misleading? The SFFH doesn't campaign for the retention for the pools, only the frontage. It wants new pools behind it and wants Louise House retained. This means that the Council can't sell any land and there's a financial shortfall.

As for the slump in housing market that's true but the Council owns the land and can borrow against its value, it's not a section 106 from a developer.

You want the Council to sell Louise House for flats instead and to cover the shortfall with that? I don't think it's realistic.
How many flats can you fit in Louise House? Not that many. And now it's listed it means that refurbishment costs are bigger and there are limits to what you can do with it. The Council's evaluation of about ?170k as to what it can bring in may be too tight but probably not too far off.

As for Marshall Street I do hope it re-opens next year, that's what I've always been told... year after year. And as you say, it is indeed sustained by flats. I was there three years ago, when together with the London Pools Campaign we organised the Golden Goggles Award there because it is such a symbol of pools stuck because of lack of funding. An officer from Westminster Council explained me the deal. Basically Westminster Council owns the land next door and gave it for a thousand years at a peppercorn rent to a developer that built those flats in exchange for refurbishing and maintaining the pool in perpetuity. Highly valuable land just given by the Council but I think no cash from the Council.

Kentish Town is another thing, Camden Council is spending a fortune on it, ?25m, and it's a listed building because it's a gorgeous building! And the economy of Camden is not the economy of Lewisham. And there aren't other pools around there so it would have been a really big political (ir)responsibility to close it because they would not have had a pool for most the schools of Camden.