Sweaty after a bike ride? Hair wrecked by the rain? You need one of my adult changing stations
Please excuse the state of my leggings, but I have an idea. What all major cities need – other than better social housing, affordable childcare, joined-up public transport and a compulsory living wage – is public changing stations.
As a cyclist – and someone who often commutes for meetings and events from far away – I am almost always caught having to wriggle out of a sweaty T-shirt and into a suit while crouched under the hand dryer of a burger chain’s toilet. Once, summoned to an early meeting with my publisher, I had to sneak past a glass-walled room in a pair of Lycra shorts and a T-shirt that said “I Preston” because there hadn’t been a single public toilet or other suitable venue to change in anywhere between the train station and the office ladies’.
How much more civilised would it be to have a space – ideally free – in which you could change your clothes, dry your hands, put on your makeup, brush your hair or just swap bras without having to sneak into a pub toilet or beg a shop assistant to use their curtained-off area? Parents who have just been vomited on, freelancers who want to put on a pair of tights, anyone who has ever turned up to an event with chain-grease-stained trousers, rainwater hair or bird mess on their jumper – all would benefit.
These pods could be staffed, of course, and the staffers’ wages could be paid by some of the billionaire landowners carving up our cities. We could put in a couple of baby-changing tables and a bin, too.
If you are thinking: “But what if people go in there to do illegal things?” my only response is: people were doing illegal things in Downing Street and nobody is making them get changed in a bush.
• Nell Frizzell is the author of Holding the Baby: Milk, Sweat and Tears from the Frontline of Motherhood
•Do you have an opinion on the issues raised in this article? If you would like to submit a response of up to 300 words by email to be considered for publication in ourletterssection, pleaseclick here