Buckingham Palace has a swimming pool. It’s a covered, indoor pool (a natatorium) within the palace complex. It’s apparently quite large and it was quite popular with many in the royal family and with senior staff. Princess Diana loved to swim, and even after her separation and divorce from Charles, she would still stop by Buckingham Palace to use the pool. Other royals do the same, although I would imagine all of the renovations being done to BP have probably stopped as many people from using it as they did during QEII’s heyday. Well, the ongoing palace renovations aren’t the only thing keeping people out of the pool – apparently, King Charles has turned down the heat and no one wants an icy swim.

He is known to enjoy living and working in teeth-chatteringly cold conditions that others can find challenging. Now, some of the King’s staff, who have long enjoyed the perk of using the swimming pool at Buckingham Palace, are also feeling the chill. King Charles has turned down the thermostat.

A source said: “A few people using the pool have noticed that the temperature of the water has dropped, and it is quite a bit cooler than it used to be. They have been told the King has had the heating turned down.”

It is understood that Charles, 74, a lifelong environmentalist renowned for his green campaigning, is keen to continue reducing the royal household’s energy use, an issue he has prioritised in recent years. He has installed solar panels on the roof at his London home, Clarence House, and at his country residence in Gloucestershire, Highgrove, and uses bath and waste water to water plants and flowerbeds. Staff often observe the King checking that no lights remain on unnecessarily.

The King has also been known to quiz his staff on lighting fires. A royal source said: “He would want to have a very good reason for why a fire was being lit, and would want to know why you wanted to heat a room beyond room temperature, whatever the weather outside. He would see it as wasteful.”

Writing in The Sunday Times last year, after Charles acceded to the throne, Julian Payne, his former communications secretary, recalled how “The King . . . always has the windows wide open. A meeting at Birkhall, his home in the Highlands, in the middle of winter was not for the faint-hearted. I can remember more than one occasion when I thought I might have actually got frostbite while trying to write with a hand I could no longer feel.”

In turning down the heat at the palace pool, Charles will also have an eye on the palace’s publicly funded energy bills, which are monitored by a network of more than 60 smart meters on the royal estate. Last year, the utilities bill for the royal palaces, which is paid for by the taxpayer via the sovereign grant, was £3.2 million. The King is also known to be keen to achieve net zero emissions in the royal household, before the government’s target date of 2050.

A source, who knows Charles well, said: “He probably thinks the whole thing is environmentally unsound, because the palace pool water has chemicals and has to be heated. It doesn’t fit with his exercise regime or his world view.”

[From The Times]

Honestly, I run hot (I always have) and I prefer the cold to anything above 70 degrees. I prefer cold workspaces too, so I’m fine with Charles keeping everything frigid. I mean, it sucks for everyone else, but he’s the king and if he likes to live and work in an icebox, so be it. I would also imagine that this is less about Charles’s environmentalism and more about him wanting to keep the riff-raff out of the pool. It’s interesting that this story has come out though – a soft story about Charles wanting to keep costs down… when it’s pretty clear that he comes and goes by helicopters, lives in like ten castles, palaces and mansions and he’s still overstaffed to a crazy degree. Charles isn’t really interested in cost-cutting, he just doesn’t want anyone else to have anything nice. Oh well.

Photos courtesy of Cover Images.