Chiltern Open Air Museum, Buckinghamshire

Still flushing

As I am not quite ready to post any recently visited buildings, this is a structure from a trip to the Chiltern Open Air Museum last summer. It consists of a number of standard manufactured parts that are designed to be shipped to the site where they can be assembled. What the original owners got when they assembled the building was a rather large public lavatory. It was built in 1906 in Caversham,. at one end of a tram line that terminated near the River Thames by Caversham Bridge.

I have posted before about metal lavatories or ‘public conveniences’ as they used to be called in Britain,* in cities such as Bath, Bristol or Lincoln. However, the loos in my earlier posts were quite small – ideal for tucking away in a small space where demand would not be too high. The Chiltern Open Air Museum’s example, on the other hand is really large. It’s made up of 451 panels of cast iron and a series of iron uprights with slots in them into which the panels slid. For privacy, there are no windows in the wall panels, but light comes in through clerestory windows in a ‘lantern’ feature that sticks up in the centre of the roof. The upper parts of the wall panels are pierced with numerous holes arranged in an ornamental pattern, to allow smells out and fresh air in. The building is divided in two, with separate parts for men and women, and the original users (from 1906, when the building was erected) inserted one penny into the slot on the door of one of the cubicles.

Now the public loo is at the museum, it is still used for its original purpose and still seems to contain the original plumbing and sanitary ware. It’s the first of these metal-panel public loos I’ve seen that is still fulfilling its original function. Impressive, it seems to me, after some 118 years of service. Most of the buildings in open-air museums are no longer used in the way that was first intended – they’re displayed as houses, shops, workshops, churches, toll houses, and so on, and very interesting they are. This example of continued use deserved to be celebrated – and not only when one is feeling the need for it after much refreshment in the museum’s tea shop.

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* British English: lavatories, public toilets, public conveniences, loos; American English: restroom, bathroom.

Gents: interior showing clerestory grilles to admit light and air

Bath, Somerset

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.