The Orbit: August 1
This week on Planet Nude: Two nudist institutions lose ground to new ownership, and a new naturism survey seeks to gather data about the movement
This week on Planet Nude
Two of naturism’s oldest institutions changed hands this week, and neither change was made by anyone who valued what came before. In Northampton, a new leisure center operator ended a naturist swim that had run without incident for 44 years, citing swimwear policy and staffing gaps rather than any actual complaint about the group. British Naturism is working on a fix, and the club’s chair expects to meet with the company and local councillors around mid-August, but decades of goodwill turned out to offer less protection than a management transition.
Meanwhile, in New Jersey, Goodland Country Club, one of the country’s oldest nudist resorts, sold for $1.35 million, well under its asking price, to buyers who plan to restore the property “without the nudity.” The estate’s roots trace back to 1936, formed in the wake of New York’s outright nudism ban; ninety years later it’s headed toward a second life that keeps the buildings and drops the reason they were built.
In both cases, the naturist history survives in structure but not in practice. Mounts Baths still exists, and the pool, sauna, and Turkish baths are all still there. Goodland’s Victorian main house and its dozen cabins remain standing too. What’s disappeared in each case is the institutional will to keep using them the way they’d always been used, replaced not by hostility but by indifference or a change in business calculus. Neither the pool operator nor Goodland’s new owners seem to have anything against nudism specifically. They’ve just decided it isn’t worth the trouble.
This month’s News of the Nude roundup pulls that thread further out. Alongside Northampton, it covers the canceled Buffalo bike ride and a separate BB gun attack on riders in Los Angeles, a reminder that the pressure on public nudity this July came from more than one direction at once, institutional in one city, physical in another.
In case you missed it:
The 2026 Naturism Survey is open through August 18. If you haven’t taken it yet, or haven’t passed it along to your club, beach group, or Discord, now is the moment.
Check out these stories and more from this week on Planet Nude.
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News of the Nude
Nudists, peaceniks and freeloading travellers: the people keeping the Esperanto dream alive.
A long feature on the World Esperanto Congress spends real time with the International Esperanto Naturist Organisation, whose members handed out pamphlets at the movement fair before slipping away mid-conference to a nude beach. The naturists show up as one node in a much larger story about invented languages and utopian movements that refuse to die, which is itself a familiar shape for anyone who follows nudism’s own long, uneven survival. The piece is worth reading well beyond the naturist angle, but the parallel is hard to miss: a movement built on idealism, persisting less through any grand victory than through the people who keep showing up anyway.
Discord Dispatch
The Discord settled into a summer rhythm this week. Members checked in from naked hikes, bike rides, and club events, while new faces continued to join the conversation and plan summer meetups.
Join us at discord.gg/8gt7D6ssMd — or click here to learn more.
Featured: 1 Naturist Life
This piece makes the case that nighttime nude hot tub soaking beats the daytime version, since darkness removes the self-consciousness of being visually monitored and turns the experience into a purely sensory, low-anxiety one. It touches on body image research around self-surveillance, the sleep benefits of warm water before bed, and the meditative pull of stargazing while soaking, plus a Jung nod about growth coming from getting comfortable with the dark. It closes with practical safety notes, keep a towel and light handy, check local rules, and frames the whole ritual as intimacy and privacy over any kind of shock value.
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