Phillip Swimming and Ice Skating Centre lost $1 million in revenue during last year's shutdown, according to manager John Raut. The ice rink subsidises the pool, so the loss of revenue is now costing the pool - and its avid open-air swimmers - dearly.

With this year's lockdown, specialist tradies from Sydney weren't able to come to do the essential maintenance work.

The skating rink is to open shortly after November 1, when Canberra's rules are expected to be relaxed greatly, but the pool will have to remain closed as temperatures rise with summer.

On top of that, Mr Raut said that new apartment blocks overlooking pools for children and toddlers unnerve parents.

"People sit on their balcony, especially on a summer day. We have mums and their baby children sitting around these small pools, and people are looking straight down at them," Mr Raut, who has managed the pool for 40 years, said.

"And we have young schoolgirls here. We just don't feel it's an environment that teachers like. It doesn't make school groups comfortable, especially girls."

There's been no allegation of inappropriate behaviour - it's just that some sunbathers don't like being overlooked so closely.

The clash between dwellers in units, on the one hand, and swimmers and sun-worshippers, on the other, is likely to get worse.

"The development around here has ruined the privacy that people have when they come to a pool," Mr Raut said. "Especially now when there's going to be another building [made up of] four towers going up across the road - one being 28 storeys - and that'll look straight into the facility as well."

Many of the new blocks have their own swimming pools, so residents have moved their laps from the big public pool to the smaller ones on their doorsteps.

The Phillip pool, unlike others in Canberra, is privately owned, so you can't quite call it a privatisation of swimming habits. But it does represent a retreat from the communal to the private.

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The immediate difficulty is the failure to get essential maintenance done. The floor of the big pool is cracked, in some places with the surface completely bare.

"The problem is that we've been shut down for quite some time now, and the time when we've been shut down is usually the time when we do our maintenance. No one could come here to work," Mr Raut said.

He's in his early 70s, and does a lot of the work himself.

"The pool needs a repaint. It needs a new expansion-joint down the centre, which is a major, major, major job. It needs some tiling and it needs lots of work around the concourse and the grounds. And on my own I just can't do it," he said.

Mr Raut intends to lay down the ice for the rink in a couple of weeks, to open to the public early in November.

He has experienced skating coaches from Russia, Spain and the Czech Republic whom he is keen to keep.

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