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.
