Posh hotels, museums, Peter Jones: the fine art of finding a loo in Britain today

We’re the country that produced Thomas Crapper – so why are our facilities so awful?

I’m 39, not 89; and yet I find myself very much in agreement with an organisation called Wales Seniors Forum, which, as you might imagine, is an organisation for older people in Wales, and has recently launched a campaign for greater access to public lavatories. Quite right, I say, as someone who often finds herself out and about in London, nipping into a nearby Pret only to find they’ve put a hateful keypad on the door and you need a special code to access them, and to get the special code you have to buy a sandwich. Sigh.

One of the contributors to the Welsh campaign, a 75-year-old chap called Martin, says he’s stopped drinking water two hours before leaving the house. “Before you go out you need to think, ‘Will there be the chance to use the toilet in a café or not?’ You end up thinking, ‘Do you want to go?’ Sometimes you just choose to stay home instead, because there is no pleasure in being constantly worried about it.”

Martin, I couldn’t agree more. The situation is abysmal. You’re up against not just keypads but cafés with fierce signs in the window declaring the facilities are for customer use only, or loos that are closed, or out of order, or you need a 20p piece. In desperation, I once fibbed, in a café with a fierce sign, that I was pregnant, and they kindly did let me use their loo in that case. But this trick is unlikely to work for poor old Martin.

It was a terrible fib that I shouldn’t have had to tell. Nor should Martin have to stop drinking water two hours before he fancies going out. But what alternative is there? Last year, Raymond Martin, the managing director of the British Toilet Association, declared that half of Britain’s public lavatories have vanished in the past decade. Sorry, I don’t want to put you off your kippers, but what if you have bowel issues? What if you’re actually pregnant? What if you have small children? “I don’t want to drop a million pounds in Caffè Nero with two-yearold twins in tow,” cries one exasperated mother.

The trouble is, councils are under no legal obligation to provide public loos and they’re cash-strapped. According to The Economist, the running cost of a busy public lavatory is between £60,000-80,000 a year, although this does slightly make me think: are they buying that expensive and unnecessary quilted lavatory paper? The Government debated appointing a “lavatory tsar” last year, but the discussion soon became dominated by shouting about gender-neutral bathrooms and the role was quietly shelved. So here we all are, bursting with nowhere to go.

My friend Matthew suggests making use of swanky hotels. “There’s always a lavatory on the ground floor, staff are used to frequently-changing faces, and the bog roll is top notch. Works in every major city in the world.” So there’s a tip for you. Claridge’s, several people tell me, is their favourite stop-off.

Except what if you’re not near a smart hotel in Mayfair? In that case, how about a nice department store? Peter Jones’s facilities have, in my opinion, gone downhill in recent months and now smell of drains. Also, you often need a head torch and a map to find department store loos, which tend to be on the sixth floor, right at the back, hidden behind haberdashery. “What I will mourn most about Fenwick closing is their incredible loos,” laments one friend. Another has a cautionary tale about John Lewis. Not long ago, she darted into a cubicle and kicked a brown pebble out of the way. “Except it wasn’t a pebble, was it,” she tells me. “The trainers I had on that day (renamed ‘the poo shoes’) sat on our doorstep for about three months and then got binned as I couldn’t face handling them.” Have soaring labour costs meant that certain places have cut back on cleaning staff? It feels like it.

Supermarkets are handy (if they have lavatories): I can vouch for Waitrose in Beckenham if you’re nearby and in need. Certain train stations have upped their game too, and Waterloo seems to be a big favourite among those I canvass, although I will say that there’s often a long queue for the ladies’ at Victoria. But then, we’re used to that, aren’t we, girls? In certain towns and cities now, you may come across freestanding public urinals for the lads, which must be jolly lovely for them. We women are presumably supposed to make use of glass urinal bottles, just as Victorian women did under their big skirts back in the day (there’s one in the Science Museum, if you’re interested).

A staggering number of people reply to my questions about public lavatories with impressively detailed knowledge of restaurant, café and museum loos. It feels as if we’re increasingly stepping out these days and thinking to ourselves “Well, it’ll be all right if I’m caught short, because there’s that good coffee shop close by, which always has a plentiful supply of loo roll and soap.” The sushi chain Itsu has “lovely” ones, say several people. The British Museum is “rather good” says another. Shell has the best service station loos, advises my friend Tash.

In some cities now there are open-air urinals for the chaps, which must be nice for them

There’s an app called Flush you can download which shows you the closest facilities. Someone else says she took a screenshot of a note on TikTok which revealed the codes for all the Pret bathrooms in London, and three months later they’re still working.

I find myself oddly proud of these friends and acquaintances for divulging such personal secrets, but I also think: why have we been forced to develop these reconnaissance skills? In Japan and Singapore, you have no such problem. Jerusalem also has excellent public loos, apparently. Two weeks ago in New York, I nervously tiptoed into a Central Park loo, only to find it spotless, with enough paper for an encampment of soldiers. We’re the country that produced Thomas Crapper; but if you brave a park loo now you may take days to get over it.

A Cambridge-based contact says that the Lib Dems are promising to improve the lavatory situation there, “and I honestly might vote Lib Dem for the first time in 20 years”. It’s an issue that plenty of us may titter about, but it’s also increasingly urgent. In a big election year, take note, politicians, and consider amending your manifestos accordingly.

I’ve spent the past few years thinking a lot about motherhood. Three summers ago I moved into the flat I live in now with my then-boyfriend and almost immediately painted over the lemon tree mural that graced the walls of the room that became our study. It had been painted for the previous owners’ baby, and it felt like something between a warning and a promise.

Almost exactly two years later, I found out I was pregnant. Fast-forward another couple of years and this morning, against that same wall, I kissed my son goodbye as my husband got him dressed to go to nursery. I’ve been a mother for 12 months now, and despite it being the toughest, most magical year of my life, if I could go back and tell myself it wouldn’t be as bad as I thought, I would.

The decision to have a child hadn’t been an easy one for me to make. I never identified with the images of motherhood I’d been presented with; I’d never found myself wanting at the sight of a babygrow. But as a heterosexual woman in a committed relationship, in her early 30s, I found babies cropped up all over the place. A huge, unspoken question mark: was I going to blow up my life, or not?

Because that was what I had been led to believe having a baby would do to me: annihilate the life I had worked so hard to create. I knew I was fortunate – I was a homeowner in London with a career I loved, a great circle of friends, a wedding on the horizon and several adventurous holidays a year. We hosted midweek dinner parties and devoted whole weekends to hangovers and idleness. A baby, we had been told, would end it all. Perhaps we could stay merrily child-free and spend our midlife getting really good at making cocktails, going to five-star hotels and spending the ungodly nursery fees on luxury skincare instead.

I had several reasons for not having a baby: it seems borderline cruel to raise a child against the backdrop of the climate crisis and impending international conflict, for one. Childcare costs continue to keep women out of the workplace, and I knew that it would be my work, rather than my husband’s, which would be compromised. I worried that the time and energy I poured into writing – a creative outlet that happens to pay my bills – would be sapped by motherhood. I also didn’t know whether my husband and I would encounter fertility struggles; I still count the fact we didn’t a huge privilege.

A year on and many of those things remain the case. I flinch at every new headline that spells doom for our existence on this planet. I now cram five days into three days a week – and as I work for myself, if the baby’s unwell I’m the one who foots the bill. I’m grateful to have a good nursery around the corner, but we’ve had to economise to make it work.

It’s hardly surprising that the birth rate is plummeting. According to the Office for National Statistics, the fertility rate in England and Wales has fallen to its lowest level since records began in 1939. We’re part of a worldwide trend: the global fertility rate has halved over the past 50 years. If we carry on at this rate, almost every country in the world will have a shrinking population by the end of the century. There are several complex socio-economic reasons for this; among them the expectation that women should do the heavy lifting of raising children while contributing to a society that doesn’t prioritise affordable childcare.

But there are also the whispered conhood

‘Over the past year I’ve slept less than I ever could have imagined – and laughed more’

versations that don’t make the headlines, the ones that I had myself before having a child – dozens of times over, with strangers I’d not met, after I made a research project of trying to work out if I should have a baby and turned it into a book. It’s a notion that a child-free and questioning friend raised in my living room just the other week: that maybe having a baby is just too difficult.

I know this feeling well because I lived with it for years – far longer, actually, than I’ve lived with a baby. The reality is something that nobody really told me: that motherhood is far better than I could have imagined.

Over the past year, as I’ve slept less than I could have ever anticipated and endured worse mental health, as I’ve laughed more and delighted in the smallest, most inexplicable nothings (the extremity of joy from watching a child who has just learned to smile, clap, crawl or speak is not to be underestimated), I’ve thought about the stories we tell about motherhood.

The interesting thing – to me, at least – is how they’ve changed over the generations. My child’s grandmothers were expected to raise us while maintaining the often isolating illusion that babies were infinitely charming things that would only improve your life. Over the past 20 years, however, things have started to tilt the other way (I like to think of Rachel Cusk’s boundary-breaking book A Life’s Work: On Becoming a Mother as a kind of watershed). Women have made the crucial space for themselves to talk about the often grisly realities of raising children; somewhere down the line mentioning the good bits got pushed aside.

I was barely out of my first trimester when a colleague dismissed my plans to get a Kindle, so I could read while breastfeeding – after all, I wouldn’t read again once I had a baby. A few weeks later I was told not to worry about where I’d put my desk, because I wouldn’t be writing again after I’d given birth. I was told that I’d undergo a change in my cognition not experienced since puberty. All of this by other women, two of whom were mothers themselves, with a kind of well-meaning glee.

I’ve lost count of the times people told me how little I’d sleep, how rarely I’d go out for dinner, how I’d never stay in a nice hotel again (contrary to their warnings, I’ve managed all three). Even as I was turning up and speaking at book festivals, a four-month-old strapped to my chest, people questioned my ability to do so. Sometimes it feels like we are so insistent that parentshould be one kind of thing that we are incapable of imagining it to be anything else.

Because while it is impossible to imagine quite the level of physical and mental fatigue a wakeful baby can induce, or the depth of the resentment you might feel as your non-birthing partner heads out to the office, it is also impossible to envisage the enormity of the experience of having a child. The heady contradiction of claustrophobia and precious intimacy that breastfeeding can induce, for instance, or that having a baby babbling in your bed at 6am can feel like a delirious daily marathon.

My matrescence has been as brutal and as wonderfully life-changing as anyone else’s. I’ve felt lonely and deeply content and blissful and trapped. I’m grateful to the women who have found the space and energy to step up and tell their stories, but I wish society allowed them to talk about the good things, too. Motherhood is too beautifully complex to be binary.

Why Women Grow: Stories of Soil, Sisterhood and Survival by Alice Vincent is out in paperback on May 2 (Canongate, £11)

In pursuit of convenience: ‘swanky hotels’ are a good bet if you’re caught short in town

iAlice and son: ‘I’ve delighted in the most inexplicable nothings’