BOSSES of the town's gyms and leisure centres say they are already working on plans to reopen their doors next month.

Prime minister Boris Johnson published his lockdown roadmap last week, meaning indoor gyms and leisure facilities will remain closed until April 12 at the earliest.

Chief executive officer of Scrappers Community Gym in West Swindon Olivia McCann welcomed the announcement but believes her gym is safe enough to open sooner.

She said: “There’s nothing we can do, if it’s about keeping people safe then we support that decision. 

“We have a very large open space which is very well ventilated and we’re doing three-metre social distancing with limited numbers of people.

“If gyms are set up like ours then we could open sooner rather than later because we’ve already got this in place. This is how we were working before lockdown. 

“But if other gyms don’t have much space then maybe we have to wait that long.

“For people’s mental health and physical fitness, the sooner they can access gyms and be able to do some sort of fitness for them, it’s essential.”

The likelihood of a limited capacity and social distancing means Olivia isn’t expecting a big boom in visitors to the gym when it does eventually reopen. 

She added: “Because we’ve got it set that there’s only eight people in the gym with two coaches at any one time, that’s the maximum, we’re not expecting a boom. 

“If a group is there at 8pm on a Tuesday night, those people will be coming at the same time every Tuesday.

“We could accommodate 50 people in our gym but because we’re not doing any contact, it means we can’t have that many people in.

“We won’t be increasing the number of people in a session until later in the year but we might increase the number of sessions per week.

“Hopefully we can welcome more people back in the summer.”

GLL, which runs the Link Centre and Health Hydro among others, welcomed the plans but could not confirm what would be in place when they reopen. 

A spokesperson for the leisure operator said: “The government has given us key dates for both outdoor and indoor exercise to aim for and our Swindon operations team are currently working through the detail to gain a full understanding of exactly what is allowed in each stage.

“We should be in a better position to publish a reopening timetable by early March.”