Britain’s public loos are a national embarrassment. If you are in any doubt, head to Liverpool Street Station and spend a penny. It’s unquestionably the most odious and unpleasant public lavatory anywhere in the supposedly civilised world. It has to be experienced to be believed, but suffice it to say that the level of cleanliness on display would make a Medicine Sans Frontier doctor fresh from West Africa recoil in fear and reach for their PPE.
The floor is usually awash in various places with unknown fluids. The long shared trough installed for handwashing is so disgusting that you wouldn’t clean your dog in it. The supposedly automatic taps barely dispense water. The soap dispensers are equally hit and miss. The clever integrated hand fans haven’t worked since 1995, or at least I’ve never got them to work. One or two of the urinals is always swathed in yellow and black tape as if it’s some sort of crime scene. Which of course it is – a crime against hygiene.
Worst of all is the smell. There is so much pungent uric acid in the air down there it’s a miracle you don’t get gout just by breathing it in. Why did the Tories waste hundreds of millions trying to get asylum seekers dispatched to Rwanda when they could simply have sent them here? Yes, it would have doubtlessly been against the law, but once those folk had got a sniff of these bogs they would be begging to cling to a Eurostar all the way to Paris.
We know that it wouldn’t wash with the Swiss. The Germans wouldn’t tolerate it. The Japanese would regard it as medieval. Liverpool Street Station’s loos would even, one suspects, be considered de trop for the French. Perhaps their farmers would dump a heap of manure on it in protest. It would smell better if they did.
The fact is, the subterranean lavatories at Liverpool Street Station aren’t a public convenience so much as a national disgrace. But the bigger problem is that, as disgusting as this facility is, it’s not alone. Nothing reeks of national decline as strongly as the state of Britain’s public lavatories.
Our public lavatories were once temples to bodily necessity – mini palaces of marble, gleaming porcelain with arches and railings – cathedrals to unspoken requirements. They were pieces of art, demonstrations of craftsmanship with ornate tiles that would make William Morris weep with joy. Now – if you can find a public loo… you usually wish you hadn’t.
Why did we stop regarding cleanliness and beauty as significant enough to invest in?
What went wrong? How did we lose our way? Why did we stop regarding cleanliness and beauty as significant enough to invest in? When did we think that a public lavatory with an eager attendant could really be replaced by small windowless capsule with an automatic door which might never reopen? Was it the 1960s or 1970s, when so much damage was done to Britain’s infrastructure in the name of modernity, progress and fiscal economy? Was it the building of all those brutalist superstructures and elevated urban expressways that did for the green and pleasant land of abundant Victorian lavatories stretching as far as the eye could see under skies greyed with swirling masses sparrows, starlings and skylarks?
Whatever the cause, those days are long gone. According to the British Toilet Association (BTA), 40 per cent of public loos have been lost in the past 25 years. A 2016 BBC report, reproduced on the association’s website, states that councils in England and Wales shut one in seven public loos between 2010 and 2013. By 2018 there were 37 council areas with no public loos whatsoever. Which is not just bonkers, it’s around the U-bend. Where are these places where the inhabitants don’t need to use the lavatory? They are a public necessity, which is why the BTA is demanding that councils should be legally required to supply them.
Because even with thousands of branches of McDonald’s – one of Britain’s main suppliers of public lavatories as well as hamburgers – there aren’t enough to go round. (And perhaps our lavatorial dependence on McDonald’s is contributing to Britain’s obesity crisis, because every time someone pops in to use the loo, they come out with a Big Mac – not without its cost to the NHS.)
So here’s a thought. Maybe as the tax burden rises to levels not seen since 1948, in addition to building more fighter planes and tanks and getting more young men and women into uniform, the government and local councils could spend a penny or two on public lavatories. You never know, it might even contribute to a sense of civic revival. And that would be good, wouldn’t it? Labour could call it a bottom-up approach for Britain.
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