Royal flush
I know, I know. I go to Bath and spend my time looking not at the Georgian squares and crescents but at the plumbing. Well, I do like and admire the great Georgian buildings of Bath, but I wanted also to pay tribute to a town that has tried hard with its more mundane buildings. After all, Bath has been associated with quality plumbing since the Roman period at least.
Public lavatories became popular in England in the 1850s and 1860s, which was when Joseph Bazalgette was providing London with its system of sewers. The public loo caught on partly as a result of the work of George Jennings. Jennings was an inventive plumber who introduced public loos at the Great Exhibition at Crystal Palace in 1851 and persuaded the exhibition authorities to charge everyone a penny to use them. The organizers were sceptical about the idea of charging, but 827,000 visitors spent a penny, and the idea caught on. In the following years, Jennings took out patents for improved lavatories, very much like the ones we use now, and during the next few decades many towns built public loos.
This example is in Charlotte Street, near the car park below Royal Avenue and east of Queen Square. I’m not sure how old it is. Much of Charlotte Street is mid-19th century, but this building is likely to be a bit later. Perhaps those heavily rusticated doorways are Edwardian. Whatever the date, it is good to see stone loos with carefully carved signs, reflecting Bath’s long tradition of cut lettering for street names. It’s not so good to see them battered, closed, and padlocked. One hopes they are not allowed to go down the pan.
Ah Bath...my family has a museum there - Mr Bowler's Business!
ReplyDeleteOn the subject of public toilets in the city, is there not an underground nightclub in some converted toilets in the centre?
Yes, the night club rings a bell. Another one to check out.
ReplyDeleteI've not been to Mr Bowler's Business yet, but it sounds good.
I was just going to write that it was about time there was a book on public toilets, The Bog Book perhaps, and then I remembered that Lucinda Lambton's already done it, as it were, Temples of Convenience.
ReplyDeleteYes. For those who want to follow this up, Lucinda Lambton's book covers all loos, not just public, and has recently been repackaged as a bumper volume with her Chambers of Convenience. Lawrence Wright wrote Clean and Decent, a history of the bathroom, and Adam Hart-Davis has also written interesting historical pieces about the development of the lavatory.
ReplyDeleteIt would be an honour to spend a penny in such surroundings.
ReplyDeleteIt would indeed, Thud. I have this slightly daft notion that councils ought to open up disused loos under a scheme called 'in for a penny, in for a pound', where people would be invited to give a pound (or more) to charity or to the restoration fund, or whatever, for the privilege of peeing in such exalted surroundings. One can but dream.
ReplyDeleteLess of the toilet. More of the lavatory. It's an uphill garden here in Italy, trying to teach children to use the L word instead of the T word, I can tell you. I sometimes wonder why I bother to be quite frank.
ReplyDeleteMust be tempting just to get them to say 'bog' and be done with it. An old teacher from my school moved to Italy to teach English back in the 1970s and liked to amuse himself by telling his charges that then-archaic slang words were current - 'old geezer', that sort of thing. There must be a few 50-year-old North Italians around with some odd English vocabulary - but I don't suppose that's news, exactly...
ReplyDelete