Downstream

carnivals of yesteryear.
Steve Newell, the swim’s
founder, explains, ‘I’d been
doing Iron Man triathlons but
I’d retired by then having
done twelve years of that. I
was talking to friends at the
Pissarro one day. I played
golf with some of them and
we’d been toying with the
idea of hitting a golf ball
across the Thames when one
said, “I bet you couldn’t
swim across”, and I said of