Learning from London’s lack of lockdown loos

The need to go is universal, yet the provision of facilities to do so is anything but. Lockdown in London has exposed the failings of the public sector to provide sufficient sanitary infrastructure, failings which have a long history

In London, a city normally abounding with restaurants, bars and galleries, those of us who are able-bodied and with disposable income never had to worry about public toilets. The Covid-19 lockdowns which have halted the consumerist landscape, have shut restaurants and pubs across the capital, and by corollary their toilets. Now, in a city suddenly without plentiful private sector loos, London's chronic lack of decent public toilet provision has been laid bare.

During the first lockdown, Londoners were allowed outside ‘for exercise’ once a day and later on, as restrictions eased, they were able to meet friends in parks. It was warm and sunny, and with London’s numerous green spaces, its residents took advantage of the eased rules. But, as quickly became clear, encouraging people to spend more time outside without making more provision for public toilets does not add up. Reports of people urinating and defecating in public piled in. A banner appeared on the fence of Clissold Park bellowing ‘The park is not a toilet, if you need to go then go home.’ Yet despite the indignant insistence of banners, Twitter warriors and journalists, for many, going home was simply never an option. Public parks without public toilets are unusable for large groups of society.

Journalist Leslie Lowe lists the groups of people who depend on free access to public toilets in her book ‘No Place To Go’: those who are pregnant or menstruating, parents with small children, the elderly, people suffering with Crohn’s disease or with ostomies and other disabilities – in short, the need is not unusual. What we call ‘conveniences’ are for many really necessities and yet in most British cities, including London, the burden to provide toilets has been placed on the private sector. But examining the history of public toilets in Britain shows the denial of facilities to various groups in society is nothing new. Marginalised groups have for a long time struggled against gender, class, race and physical mobility prejudice for decades.

The familiar landmark of wrought iron railings with prominent ‘ladies’ and ‘gentlemen’ signs heralding stairs leading below street level are iconic reminders of London's earlier public lavatories, but do not tell the entire story of how Victorian public conveniences came to be. Prior to the modern industrial age, toilets were often communal. Strict segregation arrived only in the nineteenth century, ushered in with growing anxieties over bodily display, privacy and rigid gender roles which continue to influence toilet design to this day.

Public latrinae in Ostia Antica, Italy, Wikimedia Commons

In Victorian London, it was not only a new desire for privacy that dictated lavatory design but also new inflexible ideas of gender tied to the an increasing separation of domestic and public spheres. When public restrooms were first constructed in Victorian England, they were almost exclusively for men. Women’s conveniences caused such controversy in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries London that it took five years of campaigning by the Ladies’ Sanitary Association for the local authority to consent to opening women's loos in Park Street, Camden. The issue was so contentious that motorists resorted to open sabotage, intentionally crashing into a timber mock-up of the toilets. In truth, the battle was not just about loos, but allowing women to move through and occupy public space in London more freely, which misogynists of the day deemed to contradict their belief that women belong at home.

Even after ladies’ lavatories started appearing in London alongside mens’, they were often much smaller and with fewer cubicles. (An imbalance justified by their designers as being due to women being too modest to make use of the facilities.) And whilst the use of urinals in mens’ bathrooms was predominantly free, sit-down WCs had to be paid for proving an additional barrier for female users. The rigid ideas about womens’ rights as well as about the ideal of femininity as something private, modest and surrounded by shame are epitomised in a plan of waiting rooms and conveniences in Bristol from 1898. Ladies’ restrooms are not only few in provision but also hidden deep in the plan and accessed via a series of rooms. Out of sight, out of mind.

As hard-won women's public toilets gradually became more numerous, the tight confines of the idea of femininity were revealed. Upper and middle class women were afforded the label of ‘ladies’ and finally got places to pee, but their working class counterparts were often treated very differently. Academic Barbara Penner in her paper titled ‘A World of Unmentionable Suffering. Women’s Public Conveniences in Victorian London’ describes a case in which separate ‘first class’ ladies facilities were proposed in an unbuilt design by James Stevenson in 1879 on the basis that ‘women of the middle class will not be willing to company, for however short a time, with a promiscuous crowd, even of their own sex.’ Meanwhile, the prevalence of charging for the use of public toilets on top of tax revenues continued to create a class gap in access to facilities.

During the twentieth century, as well as gender and class, racism became another driver of segregating public toilets. In South Africa and United States of America, racially segregated toilets were commonplace long into the twentieth century. Desegregated facilities had to be fought for and once the courts decided in favour of them, there was still a lot of work to do by ‘freedom riders’, who travelled the country and checked whether the restrooms were truly desegregated, often falling victim to violence and hostility.

Freedom rider Gwendolyn Jenkins attempts to desegregate facilities at Jackson Municipal Airport, Missisippi, 7 June 1961. Image via Barbara Penner

I believe there are clear parallels between the experiences of Victorian women in the nineteenth century, racialised people in the twentieth century and transgender people today. Inhabitants of ‘non-compliant bodies’, as researcher and architect Joel Sanders calls people who don't fall neatly into one of the two rigidly-defined gender categories, often face abuse or policing when attempting to use bathrooms which match their gender identity but not their sex. Just as in the past the prospect of working class women using public loos, was seen as a threat to the established social order, for some today, transgender people accessing public toilets also challenges conservative cultural norms.

In a project titled 'Stalled' Sanders suggests design solutions in order to better welcome non-heteronormative and non-binary people to public toilets. In it, he calls for the creation of ‘all-gender’ facilities with independent cubicles, each containing a WC and their own sink. Instead of adjusting the existing system, Sanders suggests a complete reinvention. The prototype design for airport facilities includes ‘a semi-open agora-like precinct that is animated by three parallel activity zones, each dedicated to grooming, washing and eliminating.’ ‘Stalled’ strips back and unpacks the practical requirements around public toilets in order to suggest a solution that addresses the biological, cultural and psychological factors, away from the increasingly out of date binary gender system, which currently fails to cater to everyone.

Whilst urinating and defecating might be thought of as private acts, the provision of public toilets cannot be treated as such. The questions of how access to conveniences is mandated, who is provided for and who is excluded are important public issues. As queues to ladies’ rooms, and the plight of transgender people show, an equitable, level playing field in public loo access has not yet been achieved. For able-bodied city dwellers with disposable income, public toilets were not at the forefront of the agenda because under normal circumstances private sector loos in pubs and shopping centres were generally accessible for customers and those who could p as potential customers. But now, in lockdown London everyone has found themselves in the same position those who inhabit ‘non-compliant bodies’ or who don’t look like model customers experience every day — a city in which the lack of equitable access to toilets limits our ability to freely move through it.

However, as the public sector washes its hands of responsibility for public washrooms, citizens are taking over. UK’s largest database of publicly-accessible bathrooms, The Great British Toilet Map is a project initiated by researchers from RCA Helen Hamlyn Centre for Design. The map benefits from an open data approach, where users can add toilets to the system. Elsewhere, lockdown lavatory access problems have spurred a similar project. ‘Lockdown loo’ now has 5000 toilets listed on their own map, with revisions and updates being sent in by users in a quest to verify whether the toilets are still open during the second lockdown.

In Penge, residents decided to list their local public toilets as an ‘Asset of Community Value’. Whilst this is not a bulletproof way to effectively protect the facilities from closing or redevelopment, it gives the stakeholder a say and a chance to influence the future of these assets. And in Margate, business owners and residents protested last year against the council’s neglect and closure of public facilities in the city. The coastal town especially needs the facilities in the summer, when tourist footfall dramatically increases, forcing people to either use the sea or rely on the provision of private establishments.

Left: Wembley Pavilion by Gort Scott, image via Dezeen; Right: Westbourne Grove Public Lavatories, image via CZWG website

It is encouraging to observe the design direction the rare newbuild facilities take. Public toilets in Victorian times might have been more numerous but were also most often modestly concealed underground. Some of London’s recent conveniences display a sense of pride in public infrastructure, like the Wembley pavilion by Gort Scott, which is wrapped in perforated golden steel. CZWG’s famous Notting Hill lavatories demonstrate a successful marriage of different functions – the playful pavilion accommodates both public toilets and a florist shop. These architecturally splendid loos show what could be possible if councils stopped hectoring taxpayers with patronising banners, and built proper facilities instead.

The scarcity of public toilets means city dwellers become conditioned not to expect them but it is worth remembering that this piece of undervalued infrastructure underpins a basic provision of urban public health and convenience that is commonplace elsewhere. As coronavirus spread globally, the design world got excited with utopian visions of future cities of buttonless lifts, innovative mask designs and shipping container hospitals. But the pandemic has in fact laid bare the most basic of needs: the fundamental requirement of decent sanitation infrastructure inclusive for all.