ABSTRACT
This chapter considers reasons for the trend in the context of the United Kingdom through two deceptively simple modes of explanation: the individual benefits and attractions of wild swimming and wider contemporary values and fashions encouraging the growth of this activity. Wild swimming in the United Kingdom has been a phenomenon of the 2010s. Across a number of disciplines and range of methods, a body of evidence supports a narrative that being outdoors and particularly in the green and blue spaces of vegetation and water is good for health and well-being. The attention to the experience as encounter between water, body, sensation and emotion is explicitly complex and relational; well-being is emergent within the assemblage of embodied material and emotional components. The chapter provides benefits and the wider narratives together to briefly reflect on the dominant orientation in understanding modern enthusiasms for wild swimming.
