Dr. John Randle spent his career watching people drown in Lagos harbour, a city built entirely around water where most residents had never been taught to swim. He also wasn't welcome at the British colonial clubs that offered swimming lessons. In 1928, rather than keep asking for entry, he built his own pool instead.
Randle was among the first physicians of West African origin, a Yoruba man practicing medicine in colonial Lagos and a serious sportsman in his own right. By multiple historical accounts, he was consistently barred from the British social and athletic clubs of the period, institutions built for colonial administrators and closed to Lagosians regardless of standing or profession. Rather than continue pressing for admission, he constructed something of his own: a public swimming pool inside what was then King George V Park, built specifically to teach ordinary Lagosians to swim in a city surrounded on nearly every side by water and lagoon.
Ninety Years, Then a Complete Second Life
The JK Randle Memorial Hall and Swimming Pool opened in 1928 as Nigeria's first public pool, and for close to ninety years it operated as exactly what Randle had intended: a civic gathering space for recreation, swimming instruction, and community life on Lagos Island. A performance hall was added in 1956, built in his memory following his death. Like much of Lagos's older public infrastructure, the complex eventually fell into disrepair, particularly during the years of military rule, and sat largely unused for a long stretch of decades.
In 2023, the Lagos State Government undertook a complete renovation of the site, reopening it in 2024 as the John Randle Centre for Yoruba Culture and History, a museum organised around a 1,000-square-metre exhibition space that tells the story of Yoruba art, language, spirituality, and history through both traditional artifacts and contemporary media. The building's curved, fractal-inspired architecture, designed by Studio Imagine Simply Architecture, deliberately references Yoruba visual philosophy and has since drawn recognition from the design publication Dezeen. A pool remains part of the site today, a direct continuation of the purpose Randle originally built the space to serve.
A Deliberate Break From the Standard Museum
Rather than operate as a conventional museum, the Centre was designed to move away from that model entirely, working directly with historians, artists, and craftspeople from Yoruba communities to build exhibits that read as living culture rather than static display. It sits a short walk from Tafawa Balewa Square, where Nigeria's independence was formally declared in 1960, and near the Nigerian National Museum, placing it at the centre of one of the most historically dense stretches of ground in all of Lagos.
Most visitors come for the masquerade costumes and the sculpture halls, understandably so. What the ground itself had already demonstrated, decades before any of that existed, was a specific kind of answer: a Lagosian doctor, shut out of one pool, chose not to keep asking twice. He built a better one, and made sure it belonged to everyone else.