THE Monkey Closets

The First Public Flushing Toilets

At the Great Exhibition, a plumber named George Jennings installed his ‘Monkey Closets’ in the Retiring Rooms of the Crystal Palace. For just a penny, visitors would get a clean seat, a towel, a comb and a shoe shine, which gave birth to the popular phrase “to spend a penny.” Visitors were fascinated with the flushing public toilets, with 675,000 pennies spent over the six months that the Exhibition was open.

Following the end of the Exhibition, the Crystal Palace was relocated to Sydenham Hill and the Monkey Closets were due to be closed. However, Jennings managed to convince the organisers to keep the toilets and they went on to raise an extra £1,000 year. Following the success of Jennings’ invention, public toilets slowly began to appear all over London and while not many Victorian public toilets survive, the remains of one of Jennings’ Monkey Closets was discovered in Hyde Park, back in 2016.