Our public loos are crumbling – and with them, our civilisation

The name of George Jennings is not much remembered nowadays. Yet as statues of tainted historical figures topple, someone should erect a monument to the man who designed Britain’s first public lavatory. Installed to relieve visitors to the Great Exhibition of 1851, the lavatories offered clean facilities, a towel, comb and shoe-shine for a penny. The conveniences proved vastly successful, and Jennings went on to sanitary glory, installing bathroom fittings for the Khedive of Egypt and Empress Eugenie, and receiving a medal from Prince Albert, who keenly encouraged his wholesome innovations.

Jennings observed that “the civilisation of a people can be measured by their domestic and sanitary appliances”. It is a sentiment that should be emblazoned in large, gilt letters on every seat of local and national government, for the dismal fact is that across the UK, public lavatories are in headlong decline. Since 2015, the number maintained by local authorities has fallen from 3154 to 2556.

The effect, as the Royal Society for Public Health pointed out in a 2019 report, is to impose a “urinary leash” on people who feel wary of venturing far from home for fear of a lack of public loos. Also on the rise is the revolting phenomenon of “wild toileting”, which increased during the pandemic, as people flocked to parks and the countryside, and the remaining public lavatories were closed.

This is not a new problem. In 2009, the then transport minister, Lord Adonis, was so appalled by the WCS he encountered on a tour of 50 railway stations that he appointed a brace of loo tsars. As so often with such figures, their appointment proved more decorative than functional. The once magnificent “Temples of

Convenience” celebrated by Lucinda Lambton in her 1978 book continued to be neglected, abandoned or put to alternative use as coffee shops or tiny arts spaces.

Ingenious as such transformations are, they ignore the pressing and universal human need so elegantly and efficiently met by George Jennings.

While the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation’s Reinvent the Toilet Challenge has spent millions of dollars on supporting safe and dignified sanitation in the developing world, the British Toilet Association’s “Use Our Loos” campaign attempts to address our home-grown dearth of decent facilities. The Victorians took a philanthropic pride in their glorious temples of convenience: I wonder how George Jennings would rate our levels of civilisation now.

Not so long ago, there was a positive infestation of the little blighters, liberally sprinkled by greengrocers over their “tomato’s”, “potatoe’s” and even “pear’s”, and bringing sensitive grammarians out in a rash. Now apostrophes are an endangered species, according to Dr Vaclav Brezina of Lancaster University, who found “a very noticeable drop in the use of apostrophes” when studying trends in spoken and written language.

Still, as Emmy J Favilla sagely observes in A World Without “Whom”, her entertaining guide to the mutable habits of modern language, a “lack of punctuation has become, itself, a form of punctuation”. And perhaps we need not worry unduly about apostrophes: something tells me they will be around to confuse and irritate us for years to come.