A leisure centre has been forced to close after the swimming pool mysteriously disappeared.

Staff at Parish Wharf in Portishead near Bristol arrived to work on Saturday morning to find an empty tiled hole where a swimming pool should have been. Roughly half a million litres drained away overnight.

Workers were baffled by the disappearance before engineers found 'a fault with the waste valve'. A spokesperson for the Parish Wharf leisure centre, which is run by Places for People for North Somerset Council, told the Bristol Post the pool had to close "due to a technical issue in the plant room where a fault with the waste valve resulted in the main pool being drained of water overnight". While the general fault has been determined, staff are still speculating just how so much water could have drained away so quickly.