The “How to Swim” and “Where to Swim” guides you need, from OSS founder Kate Rew.

This book bundle includes a hardback copy of The Outdoor Swimmers’ Handbook and a paperback copy of Wild Swim, both signed by Kate. Buy both books together in this bundle at a special, discounted price.

How to Swim: the Handbook

The Outdoor Swimmers’ Handbook ‘is like an overheard catch up of everything that’s been learnt and experienced in the last 16 years of The OSS,’ says Kate, ‘everything that we, as a community, have learnt about understanding rivers, lakes, sea, about the physiology of cold, planning swims, night swims, and how to swim better.

It’s a very poetic kind of handbook, with beautiful community photography and illustrated field guides.

“The Outdoor Swimmers Handbook is a really important, inspiring book, written by someone at the heart of the outdoor swimming movement that –– over the last fifteen years –– has encouraged millions of people to experience the wonders and friendships of Britain’s rivers, lakes and seas. Rew’s book combines hard-won, deeply researched information on how to swim safely and joyfully out-of-doors, with vivid first-hand accounts of swims in astonishing places and with remarkable people. The Handbook has a democratic purpose; to give anyone the confidence and the inspiration to begin to swim.

“In 2007 I said of Rew’s first book, Wild Swim, that it was ‘sure to launch a thousand swimmers’. I dramatically underestimated! Swim England recently estimated there to be 7.2 million outdoor swimmers in Britain. What a revolution for the good! Even as we long for open water, however, our rivers and seas suffer plagues of plastic, slicks of sewage. A culture is no better than its rivers (to adapt a line from the poet WH Auden) and our rivers are in trouble. Outdoor swimming is not only joyful, it’s also political: a declaration of action for access to cleaner, healthier blue spaces in these islands. Read on. Dive in.”

Robert Macfarlane

Where to Swim: Wild Swim

The original Wild Swim guide, written by OSS founder Kate Rew with photography by Dominick Tyler, is an introduction to over 100 of the best places to swim outdoors in Britain – rivers, lakes, lidos and the sea.

“This is a wonderful – in the old sense of that term – and joyful romp of a book. Roger Deakin would have approved. Dive in.”

Robert Macfarlane

“Her prose is perfect. Page after page she nails things. Will have you hunched on the sofa as if with a stash of love letters.”

Antonia Quirke, THE NEW STATESMAN, 26 June 2008

“The photographs in the book are particularly splendid: some have all the disarming beauty of great paintings….” MAIL ON SUNDAY Book of the Week, 8 June 2008