It was early in my son’s life and I was killing time with him in Bristol, a city we didn’t live in, while his mother was with his grandmother in hospital. This was to become a common state of affairs in the months that followed, with many hours wiled away walking the streets of St Pauls or the paths of Brandon Hill.
On one of those first excursions we found ourselves on Clifton Down, a bottle of expressed milk in my bag. In the first stages of fatherhood, I was just getting used to changing his nappy anywhere and everywhere – and realising that, with my own weak bladder and history of irritable bowel syndrome, I was also in need, I mashed “public toilet” into Google Maps and found that there was one half a mile away.
What I found when I got to this place, my baby sleeping in his buggy, were some ruined, Grade II-listed Victorian urinals, still apparently in operation. Stepping into them – which wasn’t easy – was like discovering a lost settlement, a place whose once grand edifices had been eaten away by rubbish and weeds. In short, here was a public convenience that had been more or less abandoned, like so many others.
The state of a nation’s public services, from its health system all the way to its toilets, tells you a lot about its priorities. As with so many aspects of our society, the coronavirus pandemic has revealed to many what was already obvious to plenty: that after 40 years of neoliberalism and a decade of Tory austerity, Britain is a place in which private interest trumps public comfort.
Coronavirus closed the UK’s public toilets – and many remain closed – but with the average English council already only running 15 toilets per every 12,500 citizens, what’s noticeable is how unnoticeable these pandemic closures seem. What has changed dramatically in the months of lockdown is that the cafes and shops that largely provided people with access to a toilet – usually following the spending of money – were suddenly out of bounds and the absence of toilets was clearly exposed. Public toilets have long since fallen victim to government cuts, with the assumption being that the private sector would profit from meeting the need. Now the pandemic has ripped off this private plaster and the wound beneath is revealed.
Hoping to provide some light in the darkness, a series of apps, including Lockdown Loo, have sprung up, crowdsourcing information on toilets that are currently available to use – be they reopened council-run toilets, or ones in pubs, cafes and train stations. The Lockdown Loo map has been visited almost 600,000 times since its launch in mid-June, and it is instructive to note who is accessing it. “We didn’t realise at the start,” co-founder Thomas Riley told me, “but the site seems most popular with women, those who are older, have medical conditions and young families. We list places with baby changing facilities.”
Those availing of the app were poorly served before coronavirus, of course. The BBC found that while in 2010, major councils ran 5,159 public toilets, in 2018 they ran only 4,486. Over the last two decades, the number of public facilities in the UK has dropped by 39%, while the population has increased by more than eight million. Since 2010, 60p in every pound local government receives from central government has been cut – and because local authorities are not legally required to provide public toilets, they fall victim to these cuts.
Roaming the streets of Bristol with my son, before and during the pandemic, I’ve found myself doing what many others can’t do so easily: I’ve broken the law by pissing in parks and scrapyards, my son in his buggy or strapped to my chest an unwitting accomplice to my heinous crimes. If I wasn’t an able-bodied cis man, this would either be much harder or it would be impossible. If I weren’t a white man, I would most likely attract far more attention and would, if discovered by law enforcement officers, find it far harder to talk my way out of trouble. If I was homeless, and had no access to a public facility, it would be used as an excuse to remove me from public land.
A society’s provision of public toilets may seem like a small thing but it cuts to the heart of almost everything. When out in the world, at some point everybody needs to use the toilet. Yet so often in this country we have to pay money for the privilege of doing something we have no real control over, particularly – and really this list could be endless – if we are disabled, or on our period, or pregnant, or with a baby, or suffer from a digestive disease.
What we have in the demise of public toilets in Britain is a story with which we are becoming more and more familiar – a story about a place that sold off public space to private interests. In much of the rest of the world, the idea that you would have to buy something or even simply feel ashamed to ask to use the toilets in a cafe or some similar establishment is anathema. In the UK, a nation of shopkeepers, the birthplace of modern capitalism, we are used to seeing signs that say: “Toilets for paying customers only.” Workers in cafes, pubs and restaurants are often told not to let anyone use the toilets for free – though the idea that this is a luxury one must pay for seems now to have trickled down to all of us.
• Oscar Rickett is a journalist and writer
