Rest rooms — looking back at heritage
Happy ‘World Toilet Day’ readers. There’s a serious point to this official United Nations observance day, even though it might sound like a joke.
The day is intended to draw attention to the billions of people who live in the world without recourse to adequate sanitation.
Those of us with indoor plumbing should take a moment today to reflect on what a boon that is.
But this is a heritage column and so allow me to introduce the former Whitianga Women’s Rest Rooms, which opened in August 1949, and are now the town’s information centre.
The building stands on the edge of Soldiers’ Memorial Park, which was vested in the local council in 1942 and also accommodates a number of memorial items and the Mercury Bay Library (1989).
The former Women’s Rest has been reroofed since this photograph was taken and the toilet block that superseded it, which fronts Blacksmith Lane, has also been replaced.
The building, about which I can find little online, is similar in style to the Edgecumbe, White & Leigh designed Rest Rooms and Conveniences in Hamilton East’s Steele Park.
These were erected in c.1945 by the Hamilton Borough Council and have been highlighted for their heritage significance by a submitter to Hamilton City Council’s Plan Change 9, to which further submissions closed yesterday.
The provision of public toilets has long been a feminist issue, given that you can’t venture far from home if there’s nowhere in the public domain to spend a penny.
Often public conveniences for women were erected in tandem with Plunket Rooms, as was the case with the
Ngā ruawā hia and Tuakau Plunket Rooms, about which I have already written. [Men, on the other hand, just had toilets built for them.]
Another example of the toilet/Plunket combo that I can’t resist mentioning here are the Centennial Memorial Rest Rooms in my hometown Oamaru. Ivan Steenson, a relative by marriage, was the architect and this building opened on February 1, 1941.
It also accommodated a North Otago Early Settlers’ Lounge, which given the timeframe was presumably a reference to the colonial settlers and not the tangata whenua of Waitaki. Built from the local sandstone, the Oamaru building evokes the town’s classical grandeur, whereas the Whitianga and Hamilton East buildings are altogether more domestic in appearance with their clay tile roofs and cement rendered walls.
Heritage New Zealand Pouhere Taonga lists half a dozen public rest rooms, including the Oamaru building, and there are further examples scheduled on district plans around the country. Where architectural design meets a history of accommodating women in the public space you have the makings of heritage significance; one that is particularly resonant on World Toilet Day.
Where architectural design meets a history of accommodating women in the public space you have the makings of heritage significance