Outdoor Swimming Society

The Outdoor Swimming Society is a British organization founded in 2006 by Kate Rew to promote outdoor and wild swimming, and now counts more than 200,000 members. Rews 2008 book Wild Swim is credited with helping revive public interest in wild swimming across the United Kingdom, and the society built on that interest by organizing outdoor swimming events and fundraising swims for its members. Beyond its recreational side, the society also acts as an advocacy group, campaigning for public access to open water for swimming and organizing direct action, including trespass, in pursuit of that access; it once ran a website mapping wild swimming spots across the UK, which it took offline during the COVID-19 pandemic because of overcrowding concerns. This description is adapted from Wikipedia contributors under CC BY-SA 4.0; changes were made. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/