Parson's Pleasure

Some of the regular users of Parson's Pleasure collected funds and purchased a side of bacon for Hounslow, a married man with five children, who had rescued two other swimmers in that vicinity within the previous five months.

[3][4] As well as being a champion swimmer Hounslow was also a swimming teacher and consequently spent a considerable amount of time at Parson's Pleasure and over the next several years he rescued a number of people from drowning.

In July 1847 a Mr Doughty from Islington got into difficulties at Parson's Pleasure, the water there reported as being seventeen feet (5.18 metres) deep; Samuel Hounslow dived in and brought him to shore unconscious but alive.

Ladies sitting in passing punts were saved from potential embarrassment by being directed to a path that skirted the area behind a high corrugated iron fence.

The title poem of Christopher Morley's 1923 collection Parsons' [sic] Pleasure describes the area as A greengloom sideloop of the creek, A sodden place of twilight smell: Clear dayshine did not often touch That water; and a mouldy hutch For the convenience of undressing.

There men’s white bodies, nude, Unconscious, comely, gallant, Greek, Stretched, tingled cool, shone sleek, lived well

Slugs in the dressing hutches, no life in the water, no sun to stand in when drying, the chill of a morgue over the whole place on all but the most fervent dog days.

In 1996, the Oxford University Beer Appreciation Society commissioned a local brewery to produce a barley wine called "Parson's Pleasure Ale".

There also exists a bell-ringing method named Parson's Pleasure Surprise Maximus, which was rung for the first time in September 2010 by a band of ringers composed of former members of the University of Oxford.