I often bluff about my extensive travels. Wigan Pier? Of course I have been to Wigan Pier.

When I was invited to breakfast at the Southwark Lido, I pretended I knew the lovingly listed and restored 1930s open air swimming pool, reopened to hardy swimmers.

In reality, I wondered how I could have worked in Southwark for five years without having discovered its lido.

When I arrived at 100 Union Street SE1, the joke was on me.

The quirky developer, Roger Zogolovitch, chairman of Solid Space, had taken the site for which he had consent for offices, flats and restaurants and installed a lido. It was less than a meter wide and as long as the average ornamental fish pond.

As part of the celebrations for the London Festival of Architecture, Zogolovitch had covered the site with shingle and installed 10 beach huts and a few dozen deckchairs. Festival workers lived in the beach huts during the month-long festival.

It was a cheerful way to keep interest alive in one of many hundred of development sites where nothing else is happening in property development.

Zogolovitch was upbeat as the trains thundered behind and above him on Southwark viaduct and the social housing tenants on the opposite side of Union Street must have wondered was going on.

He called his un-started development SoSo to catch the glamour of Soho and Noho.

Yet the whole cheerful open air breakfast was reminiscent of the early 1990s.

Then, everyone enjoyed stories of naïve shed agents who leased out empty warehouses unknowingly for ecstasy-fuelled raves. My own experiences were more cerebral because office agents hired gold chairs and experimental theatre companies to try out new works in unlettable office space.

I have not yet swum in Southwark Lido, and don’t know whether it will be reinstated for the next London Festival of Architecture. But maybe in this downturn, I’ll discover the next Pinter of Ionesco.