Tim Walder is right to the extent that cutting down to the bone you can build something that resembles a pool and leisure centre, although from the ?7.5m budget you'd have to deduct the sum destined to the restoration of the Superintendent House and the clearance of the site that is occupied by the pools now to start anything (the extention to Wavelengths was built on a car park).
At that point, since you wouldn't have any contingency money you'd have to hold tight and hope that inflation doesn't stop your building site or make you decide to drop this or that part of the building half way through.

He is even right in pointing at the fact that a modern pool just built by Lewisham Council desn't look bad, which is surprising, I would have said that he was against all modern buidings, or "vanilla boxes" as they are now fashionably called on the Sydenham/Forest Hill border.

To Forest Hill Billie, it's my experience with the London Pools Campaign, not Save Ladywell Pool that suggests me that it would be better to have a modern pool at this point.
I've been involved with that for years and for years I've been the recipient of stories of misery around Victorian Pools, neglected and closed down and then fighting to be refurbished, struggling for funds and so on. It's the same story all the time. And it's my opinion that if the old pool is not much to start with and there is a serious plan for a new built then you're much better advised to let it go and grab the opportunity.
I was even a speaker at a Victorian Society conference on pools once! For every success story in keeping an historic pool there is a battalion of failures and compromises on size, opening times, pricing, you name it.
It only works when the buiding is exceptional and there are funds for conservation beside those for sport. Building and running pools' costs are serious amounts, if you add to the burden then you take away from sport and I don't think that that is right at all. What's worst is that those costs can take away so much that you put at risk the centre altogether.

I looked back at the Council's original options, they aren't bad at all, especially options 2 and 3, they are obviously not cheap, that's what Forest Hill could have had. That would have created a very good place where the swimming club can do its sterling work with kids, where regular swimmers would have found a slot for their fitness lanes and all the other activities that you can carry in a well sized and funded pool. There's a good size gym and two fitness suites to accomodate all the dry activities that are those that help a centre to be financially viable in the long run. And if a centre costs less to run then it's more likely to survive budget cuts.
Old Forest Hill Pools being the perfect example of what happen to a centre that costs a packet to run because it's not being designed with profitability in mind. An extension to the old (not pretty) Superintendent House is posible, what you'd get would be a small thing, benefiting a small area round it and at risk of reduction of opening times or altogether closure at the first tightening of budgets because unprofitable.