How Henry VIII Dissolved the Toilets and Other Things I Learned in York

I have a UK bucket list of adventures to complete in the next two and a half months.

Number one on the list: The York Historic Toilet Tour!

I have known for awhile that I'm not the world's only. Google tells me there was a woman in Berlin who started them in 2010, though I haven't been able to trace her. But a few months back I discovered another British colleague operating in York.

On Wednesday I traveled on a ridiculously early train from London to York in time for the 10:30am start. I found the gate where several others were waiting. By the time the tour started there were about ten people.

Our guide, Warrick, plunged right in with the puns... "So you're all here for this crappy tour?" He told us straight off that the tour was going to be full of jokes and rude words and that this sometimes offends people. It made me giggle because one comment I used to get early on in my own toilet-touring career was that there weren't enough! I guess you can't please all the people all the time. I won't recap the entire tour here, as it would be very long indeed (and I've got to leave those of you in York a reason to go yourselves!)

We walked to the wall in the museum gardens where he showed us some pictures of toilets and started in with the Romans. Familiar territory there... communal latrines, the sponge on a stick. Roman York had a population of about 10,000.

Then we got into less familiar territory. After the Romans Great Britain was invaded by "a bunch of pesky Eastern European immigrants... called the English." The Angles and Saxons brought with them their own lavatory systems, which usually involved the digging of cesspits.

Up until the 1500's good sanitary practices were maintained in monasteries which continued to have plumbing and encouraged hand washing. Many public toilets were funded through 'Pious Endowments' (Warrick described these as endowments made on a deathbed so people would sit and pray for the soul of the deceased.) Then came Henry VIII and with the dissolution of the Monasteries came the dissolution of the toilets. The sanctuaries of health and hygiene were dismantled and parceled out to the king's favorites.

From there we wandered past the smallest window in York (the window of a Gardrobe!), through some free toilets, and up the walls. In between stops he would jet off in front of the group quite quickly, but when we were gathered the stories continued to flow through the Victorians and into modern York.

York's Smallest Window

Toilets in the King's Manor just outside the city walls are clean and free! 

We ended near the site of the convenience known as 'Splash Palace' which had been erected at the end of Parliament Street in 1991 and was dismantled several years ago due to its garishness and problems of maintaining the facilities (it must have still been standing when I last visited in 2010, but that was before I was quite so aware of toilets!)

I asked Warrick how he got into toilet tours (I'm always interested in how people start on the subject!) and he told me the first inspiration was a lecture by Andrew 'Bone' Jones who gave a lecture on the subject but didn't have time to develop a tour of his own. His other main source has been Hugh Murray's 'Where To Go in York' written in 2000. It is a 59 page history of the local toilets.

The book is out of print, but Warrick sold copies at the end of the tour, so I'm now the proud owner of a copy. It made for some good reading on the train home.

Warrick, Me, and the 'Where to Go in York' book!

In the book everything pre-victorian is covered in the first three and a half pages. York went through a similar population expansion to London between 1801 and 1850 with the population  more than doubling. But it seems the consideration of toilets was driven largely by beer. Urinals were erected at every city gate, so that men had no excuse for not passing by them

A urinal would have once stood by this wall near where the black door is. They eventually put a roof on it not so much to protect the users as to protect passing ladies from an unpleasant view. 

The book ends with the current state of affairs in 2000 when it was published:

"The current situation is that York now has just 13 public conveniences, six in the city centre (one for the exclusive use of the disabled), five in car or coach parks, and just two in the suburbs. This is a far cry from the heady days of the 19th Century. Whether this is adequate for a city which relies on its visitors for its well-being, only time will tell, but what is certain is that the need will always be there unless the human race can be genetically re-engineered." 

It seems things have declined a bit since then. Splash Palace is closed with nothing to replace it, and there are now ten facilities listed on the City of York's website. Yet tourist trade still appears to be booming. You can't turn a corner without bumping into a guided walk of some sort, and the attractions are constantly busy. Perhaps their saving grace is the small size of the town... you can walk one end to the other in 15 minutes or less, so chances are that unless your need sneaks up on you there won't be too far to go.

Another potential saving grace is the friendliness of the people in the city. From a professor of Medieval Latin Literature who chatted with me in the coffee shop, to a woman who stopped to ask me about my knitting, to the friendly fellows of the Fudge Kitchen who entertained me while I took forever to make up my mind... I don't think I've talked with so many strangers in the space of 24 hours in a good long while. I can't see any of them refusing toilet access to the needy.

After wandering around York for the day I had intended to go see a play, but after waiting at the theatre for about 20 minutes I and my fellow would-be audience members were told it was canceled. I went back to wandering the streets hunting for abandoned toilet sites until I was eventually adopted by one of York's Ghost Walks (www.theoriginalghostwalkofyork.co.uk)

Mark, the tour guide, was great fun. It was a slightly more historically grounded ghost tour than a lot of the others I have been on, and he had both a great storytelling technique and brilliant crowd control skills.

In a funny crossover, George Villiars, Duke of Buckingham featured on the tour, haunting a pub by the river. His highness gets a passing credit on the Loo Tour as the owner of a stunning watergate, now landlocked by the Embankment which was built to house the sewer system. Apparently when he died it was his wish to be buried in York, but the King had other ideas, so his body was interred in London. But that didn't stop him from going back to haunt the Cock and Bottle pub which stood on top of a piece of land he once owned.

Sci-Fi from the Bottom Up (A Talk for Loncon 3)

For those who missed it, or those who want a refresher, here are the notes from ‘From The Bottom Up: The Fantastical World of Human Waste’ delivered at Loncon on 17 August, 2014.

Disclaimer: The words that actually came out of my mouth may or may not bear any resemblance to the original plan!

***

Hello and thank you to everyone who has not only stuck it out until 9pm but also chosen to come to a talk about toilets over going to the Hugo Awards Ceremony!

I expect this makes you all extremely intelligent interesting and classy people, so I hope we’ll eventually get on to a rousing discussion about the role of science fiction in inspiring new real world innovations. But first I’m going to speak for a bit about why I pitched this talk, and my own research into the subject.

I currently run London Loo Tours, which is a walking tour of public toilets. The whole thing started as a joke. If you have been around London you’ll know that a lot of the public toilets here cost anywhere from 20 to 50p to use… which if you are a poor and miserly student like I was when I moved here can sometimes be dinner money! I thought the tour might last a month and that would be that, but a year and a half later it is more or less my full time job, and I have found the topic more bottomless than I could have imagined. It encompasses such a wide range of topics; health, history, sociology, anthropology, psychology…  (and many other things ending on –ology!)

But when a friend suggested I pitch a talk on the subject for Loncon even I was initially a bit stumped. In my experience science fiction and fantasy tend to be about space ships and dragons… Not sewer systems and poo!

But then I came across the following quote from the website of the Bill and Melinda Gates re-invent the toilet challenge which was launched in 2011 to encourage engineers to find new solutions to global sanitation:

“Although we can fly people to the moon, 40 percent of the world’s population - 2.5 billion people - practice open defecation or lack adequate sanitation facilities.”

~ Dr. Doulaye Kone

I want you to picture the scale of the problem for a moment… imagine that a third of you aren’t allowed to use the toilets in the ExCel centre. When you have to go, you’re going to have to go outside and find as private a place as you can. Most of you are going to end up practicing open defecation (which in laymens terms means having a shit on the side of the road.)

In 2002 the United Nations set a series of development goals meant to be achieved by 2015. The most off-track of these is 7c: to halve the number of people without access to a toilet. While sanitation is often the under-valued ugly duckling compared to it’s much sexier cousin ‘access to clean water’ it is one of the best investments a country can make.

A lack of sanitation is the number one killer of children in developing coun­tries, and leads to decreased productivity and higher school drop-out rates, particularly among young women.

Coming back closer to the world of Science Fiction: several months back I saw an interesting headline in the Evening Standard:

‘Young engineers more likely to be inspired by Iron Man than Brunel’.

A study carried out by Career Academies UK on students ages 16 to 19 had found that the young people tended to cite films such as Transformers, The Matrix and Star Wars rather than historical figures having inspired them to pursue STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics) subjects.

The article took a sort of despairing doom and gloom tone… what a world are we coming to when young people care more about fantasy than their history.

But I thought “AWESOME!!!” At last some validation that two degrees and tens of thousands of dollars spent on learning how to entertain people might be justifiable from the perspective of social good after all!!!

Science fiction tends to look outwards towards the stars, and not back. But anyone who is suitably nerdy has probably at some point asked themselves where the toilets are on the star trek enterprise.

There is a whole wiki page devoted to this subject! A couple highlights:

“The brig aboard Starfleet ships included facilities such as a sink and toilet, which were enclosed behind the wall until needed. A sign above the toilet read "do not use while in spacedock." (Star Trek V: The Final Frontier)”

According to Jonathan Frakes during the "Journey's End: The Saga of Star Trek: The Next Generation" special in 1994, the Enterprise-D had only one bathroom and he proceeded to point to it on the large cross-section of the Enterprise-D in the main engineering set.

Or on the TARDIS… this one is harder to find answers to on forums, but there have certainly been plenty of parodies due to the similarity of the shape of the Police Box and the portable toilet! In fact there was an interesting investigation in September 2013 on Tardis Toilet Hire…  a company which had been trading for 15 years. BBC carefully protect their logo and the name, which they trademarked in 1976, but the company argued that his logo was not in any way meant to resemble the time and space traveling machine (okay, maybe it had a light on top and windows, but it was orange so couldn’t possibly be copyright infringement.)

In Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey a zero gravity toilet was included, complete with instructions for use. Descriptions include devices such as a “Sonvac cleanser” and “the uroliminator.”

In researching this talk I also stumbled across several forum threads on the flushable toilets in Mass Effect. (see here)

But toilets are usually thrown in as light relief. They rarely take center stage.

While humans or aliens couldn’t function the same without them, they are either too taboo to talk extensively about, or too mundane a part of every day life to be included as key points in the story. So we have to be content with the fact that they are there somewhere and function exactly the way they are supposed to (as evidenced by the fact that there isn’t poo sitting in the hallways or - in zero gravity contexts- floating through the ship!)

One notable exception to this rule of sidelining sanitation in the world of Science Fiction and Fantasy is of course Terry Pratchett. Pick up any of his disc world books and you will almost without fail find some reference to a lavatory, cesspit, or dung-heap. He has even written ‘The World of Poo” (a companion to Snuff) which features young Geoffery’s adventures learning about the wonderful world of human waste.

The Pratchet character with whom I have the strongest affinity is, of course Harry King… Piss Harry to his friends and King of the Golden River to most others.

Harry’s fortunes are based from enterprises dealing in human waste. To quote from The Truth:

“The real foundations of his fortune came from when he started leaving empty buckets at various hostelries around the city… he charged a modest fee to take them away when they were full [… ] in a small way, making the world a better smelling place.” (The Truth, 107)

But Harry doesn’t stop there. The passage goes on to say:

 “There is very little, however disgusting, that isn’t used somewhere in some in­dustry. There are people who want large quantities of ammonia and salt petre.” (ibid)

It’s a model not dissimilar to the Roman urine collectors who used to leave pots at the corners of streets, which they could then sell on for tanning, dying and whitening teeth (there is excellent Latin poetry about how if someone had a very white smile you knew exactly what he had been gargling!)  The practice was so common that the Roman Emperor Vespasian actually imposed a tax on Urine in the year 70AD.

Pratchett’s sources are reasonably grounded in History. I pestered his publisher awhile back to see whether he could enlighten me on the matter and he very kindly wrote back to tell me that sources included Henry Mayhew’s Labour and the London Poor and Dorethy Hatley’s Water in England (Not Vespasian as far as he knew… but I still think there is some resemblance in the business model!)

Anyone who has read the Diskworld books will be aware that Ankh Morpork bears a striking resemblance to 19^th Century London. This is, coincidentally or not, about the time when the flush toilet started becoming popular. While the flushing toilet was in many ways one of the greatest life-saving devices ever invented it also served to divorce humans to some extent from their excrement.

Have you ever stopped to think about how cool toilets actually are? You go for a poo or a wee in a porcelain bowl (and how often do you even eat off porcelain), push a button and it magically disappears never to be seen again (at least by you!) We do this five or six times a day, flushing over a third of the clean drinking water in the UK!

We can do this largely because in the year 1858 London faced the Great Stink, when the pollution of two and a half million humans became too much for the city to handle. It was a very hot June and the Thames heated up and smelled so bad that the problem could no longer be ignored. The man called upon was engineer Sir Joseph Bazalgette who built London’s Sewer System, which carried all the waste out of London to the east (where they still actually dumped it directly into the Thames, but at least not in the city centre, and it could be washed out by the tides.) This is the same system we still use in London today, though it is now treated before it is released back into the wild.

It was the beginning of a new revolution and sanitation as we know it today, but the end of night soil men, gong farmers and urine collectors, and in some ways the end of a natural and practical recycling loop.

There is a second reason I am fond of Terry Pratchett in addition to his un-squeamishness when it comes to the scatological. It is the way he constructs his worlds, and the rules which they follow.

A key idea Pratchett often speaks about is Narrativium.

“Humans add narrativium to their world. They insist on interpreting the universe as if it’s telling a story. This leads them to focus on facts that fit the story, while ignoring those that don’t.”

                        (Science of Diskworld I:233)

 Narrativium is how we make sense of which facts of our world to take into account. In Diskworld things happen in particular ways because that’s how it makes sense for them to work. A commonly cited example is that dragons breath fire not because they have asbestos lungs (or similar such nonsense) but because everyone knows that’s what dragons do.

I find it singularly appropriate therefore that such a practical approach is taken to bodily functions and what happens to the waste. It makes a good kind of sense. It is a harmonious recycling loop, where nutrients come back round.

As a general rule this sadly cannot be said of our round-world narrative. Re-using our own waste is no longer seen as a natural idea, but something rather odd and a bit gross.

This may well be changing over the next few decades.

Though no entrepreneurs have yet plumbed the depths of Harry King’s monopoly on the market entrepreneurs are beginning to show an increased interest in the subject. The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation’s  ‘Re-invent the toilet’ challenge not only focused on finding new non-waterborne means of waste disposal includes a remit to:

 “[Remove] germs from human waste and [recover] valuable resources such as energy, clean water, and nutrients.”

A current example of award winners are a group of researchers at the Bristol Robotics Laboratory who have developed a means of charging mobile phones using urine. The researchers say:

“One of the problems is going to be people’s perception to actually using their own waste as a potential source of fuel. There is a definite yuk factor.”

I wonder whether story telling might serve as inspiration not only for engineers and inventors but for influencing our every day behavior.

 There are over 7 Billion people living on earth. On aver­age it is estimated that the world’s population can produce 2.8 billion gallons of urine in a day: enough to fill up 4,200 Olympic swimming pools! So whoever can find a way to harness that resource and reuse it will be onto something fantastic indeed!

I leave you with the following question, though of course our discussion may take many additional directions!

1) How has science fiction inspired you?

2) What role do you think stories, films, games and fantasy worlds might have in influencing real life behavior?

3) And of course just for fun… any favorite science fiction toilet moments?

There followed a hugely engaging 45-minute discussion with many contributors from the audience. I was not able to transcribe most of it, but have included a very few highlights and notes below (and may add more as time allows.) A tremendous thank you to all who shared stories!

 Do feel free to continue the discussion in the comments section, on twitter (@londonlootours #lonconloos) and over the dinner table!

Further mentions of toilets/scatological in Science Fiction:

Babylon 5 includes a scene at a urinal. 

Robocop includes a toilet scene (viewable here)... note the CCTV in the toilet!

The Martian by Andy Weir stars an astronaut, botanist and engineer stranded on mars who must improvise with the available resources (including human waste) to survive.

The Dark Light Years by Brian Aldiss deals with human encounters with Aliens called the Utods who worship their own feces.

A further Terry Pratchett influence is The Specialist.

The mysterious origins of the word 'Loo':

The origins of the word “Loo” are frequently attributed to the Medieval cry of “Gardy-loo” (derived from French “Gardez-l’eau… the polite thing to shout before emptying a chamber pot out the window.)

This was called into question, and an audience member supplied a link suggesting more recent origins.

http://www.worldwidewords.org/qa/qa-loo1.htm

Museums and Exhibitions worth visiting:

Gladstone Pottery Museum in Stoke on Trent

National Air and Space Museum in Washington DC

Recycling Nature's Bountey

Text to be added shortly, but here, in the meantime is my poster for London's Science Fiction convention!

Talk for Crohn's & Colitis Mid-Essex Medical Meeting.

Notes from a talk delivered for Chron's & Colitis Mid-Essex Group on 14 June, 2014.
Education Centre, Southend Hospital.

A Brief History of Public Toilets and How I got into them

Thank you for inviting me here today! As someone with no medical qualifications I'm here to lighten the mood and hopefully provide a bit of useful information on public toilets. We'll roughly cover:

• My story, and how I got into doing what I do
• History of the British Public Toilet (a sneak preview of what you’d get on a tour!) and the social context that has shaped provision of today.
• Making toilets talkable, and specifically the role of humour in erasing taboos and dealing with uncomfortable subjects. 

Part I: How Loo Tours was created

This is me on graduation day in 2012 from the Central School of Speech and Drama.

I thought my whole life I was going to go into theatre. I grew up doing ballet, and then moved into directing and later into stage management and costuming. I had fallen in love with England during a study-abroad programme during my undergrad, largely because of its arts scene, and decided that this was where I wanted to live forever and ever.

I moved to London in September 2011 to study for my Masters in Applied Theatre, which is essentially theatre with some sort of social mission… so it encompasses theatre in Education, Theatre in development, theatre in prisons… that sort of thing. 

When I wasn’t studying I was always exploring the city, and I developed a slight obsession with where I could use a toilet for free.  I did not like having to pay 30p! You can get a very good sainsbury’s basics chocolate bar for that!

So I started to learn where the free publicly available toilets were. And I started noticing things like the fact that in Westminster station it cost 50p rather than 30.

This lead to a joke with my family that I should write a guidebook (It was going to be called the Wee Guide.)

It would have remained a harmless joke, had I not happened to mention it during an interview to be a tourguide. My interviewer immediately went “you should do a tour of that!”

My first thought was “how?!?!?” We’ll go around and pee for three hours… it’ll be great!”

But being a curious person I started researching to see what I could find, and found it’s a much richer and deeper world than I ever could have imagined. Here are just a few of the adventures I have been on in my year of being a Toilet Tourguide: 

An interview with Paul Martin for ITV's I Never Knew That About Britain

Attending the World Toilet Summit in Solo Indonesia

Running a Loo Tours singles night in collaboration with doingsomething.co.uk

Part II. The Rise of the Public Toilet

One area I focus on particularly in my tours is how the public toilet got to be the way it is.

The British Public Toilet is a sort of institution. Generally public toilets in this country are traced back to the Great Exhibition of 1851 the Crystal Place in Hyde Park. 

Though strictly speaking there were certainly public toilets around before this date, these were the first ones to receive a lot of press and recognition. The project was backed by the Society of the Arts, and they used it as evidence in their final report to parliament that the public of London wanted and needed toilets.

People were somewhat skeptical about the whole thing, but over the 6 months of the exhibition the toilets has 827,280 visitors and raised £2441, 15 Shillings and 9 pence.  When the Crystal Palace was later moved down to Sydenham, George Jennings, the sanitary engineer who had been responsible for the delivery of the project managed to get permission to move the water closets as well, where they continued to generate a profit of approximately £1000 a year.

This sparked a sort of revolution as people realized that there was potential profit to be made with the provision of public toilets, and, if there can ever be said to have been a golden age of public toilet provision, then the end of the 19^th century probably was one! 

But all things were not created equal: designers of the time were almost exclusively white able-bodied males, and the toilets of the time very much reflect this. On-street Urinals were much more common than actual water closets, and  often-times even when there were underground toilets provided these were often-times for men only. Even the underground provision often favoured men, with Women's toilets being much fewer and far between. 

A great campaigner for more equitable toilets was the playwright George Bernard Shaw who, in 1910 wrote an essay called “The Unmentionable Case for Women’s Suffrage”

"The unmentionable question of sanitary accommodation occupied a good deal of the time of the Borough Council. I invite the male reader to give his mind to this with some care. The sumptuous public lavatories which now provide the poor man with the only palatial luxuries he ever uses meet two requirements, one of which, being frequent and simple, costs him nothing; whilst the other, involving the use of a separate private apartment, costs him a penny. If this charge of a penny were extended to the gratuitous accommodation, which is used perhaps a thousand times for every once of the other, there would be an explosion of public indignation which would bring to its knees at once any municipal authority which dared to impose it. Women had two grievances in the matter under my Borough Council. The first and worst was, that in most places no sanitary accommodation was provided for them at all. But this, at least, was known and understood. The second, which no man ever thought of until it was pointed out to him, was that even where accommodation was provided, it consisted wholly of the separate apartment at a charge of one penny: an absolutely prohibitive charge for a poor woman… The moment it became known that I was one of those ungentlemanly and unromantic men who reject the angelic theory of womanhood, I received piteous anonymous letters from women begging me to get the penny charge at least reduced to a halfpenny. These letters, and the reports and complaints as to the condition of all the little byways and nooks in the borough which afforded any sort of momentary privacy, revealed a world of unmentionable suffering and subterfuge"

On something of a side note, I have a theory at the moment that the reason we have lived for so long in a male dominated society for so long is men’s ability to pee standing up. Everything from out facilities to the fly front zips on trousers is designed to accommodate this!

This male-domination is a trend that continues a bit even today. 

This is a uri-lift, which is an open-air urinal that remains underground in the daytime and then pops up at night. London has installed quite a few of these, and they are great for preventing drunken men from urinating on the streets.

The company that makes them actually has a similar design that is accessible to women, with a closing door, and a sit-down toilet inside. As far as I know London has not installed a single one of these, so women who are out at night have nowhere to go.

The logic is obvious: Men are anatomically more able to pee anywhere so this is a preventative measure to stop them doing so. Ladies: If we want more toilets we have got to start peeing on the streets!

We have developed what some writers call a 'false consciousness' around toilet provision, and have learned to take for granted longer queus, and holding it when necessary. In my opinion, we need a bit more of Shaw's "explosion of public indignation" to change the situation!

Part III: Toilets and Taboo: Bringing them out of the closet!

This brings us to the heart of the trouble with toilet provision today, and that’s the difficulty people often seem to have in talking about them.

Along with a precedent for toilet provision, the Victorian era has very much evolved our perceptions around taboos and bodily functions and where they take place. We are supposed to be disembodied creatures, and so to admit to our actual physical bodily functions can be embarrassing (and more so if they differ to or are more urgent from other people's needs.) Culture has made them secret and shameful. It is the era where genders were decidedly separated, and toilets became less talkable. To quote Shaw’s essay once again:

“English decency is a rather dirty thing. It is responsible for more indecency than anything else in the world. It is a string of taboos. You must not mention this : you must not appear conscious of that: you must not meddle with the other - at least, not in public. And the consequence is that everything that must not be mentioned in public is mentioned in private as a naughty joke.” (G.B. Shaw, 1910)

That is still the culture we are still in today, although I think toilets are slowly becoming less taboo… One of the things I actually love about my job is that as soon as people learn what I do they usually have a toilet story, and I think, in fact most people are closet toilet-enthusiasts if you get the right hook. 

One of the most prominent global toilet campaigners is Jack Sim, a Singaporean Entrepreneur who goes by the name Mr. Toilet. His campaigning philosophy is that if you can laugh at yourself you can get others to laugh at you. And if you can get them to laugh at you then you can also get them to listen to you.

That is where my work sits at the moment, and I’m always trying to figure out how to use the entertainment side of what I do to get some action to take place. I think one of the biggest challenges around improving toilet provision is that quite a lot of people are apathetic about it, either because it doesn’t affect them very much, or else because we are socially conditioned to deal with the inconvenience. 

So What Can we Do About It? 

These are just a few general points, and there are doubtless many more things that can be done, but they are my recommended simple starting steps: 

• Let MPs and local councils know it’s important to you! As long as people are silent about it they are likely to continue closures. Chances are though, they do want to give you what you want. 
• Celebrate what is done well!!! From letting councils know what is working to letting local businesses know how much you appreciate being allowed access when they grant it! If a toilet is particularly well-kept or accessible, it's worth pointing that out as well.
• Talk about it! Probably the most important thing of all is to get the conversations going (from whatever perspectives interest you.) It’s surprising what good conversations you can have over dinner!!! 

I am continually on the lookout for ways to expand Loo Tours and to make what I do useful as well as entertaining, so if you think I can be of help in any way, or have a story that you think needs to be shared don't hesitate to get in touch!

Thank you!


Some Links mentioned during the Q&A:

I have a select list of toilet maps and apps on my website at: http://lootours.com/london/maps.html
For those interested in the Radar key scheme, information can be found at:
https://crm.disabilityrightsuk.org/radar-nks-key

7 Gift Ideas for the No. 1 Dad

Father's Day is almost here, and if you're like me it has crept up on you, and you're suddenly realizing that you need to do something about it!!! Here are 7 gift ideas for the slightly quirky, but still classy father.


1) The Good Loo Guide

An all-time classic guide to the loos of London by Jonathan Routh. Perfect for the dad who is always yearning for the good old days when public conveniences were a matter of pride!
No longer in print, but you can Buy on Amazon


2) Twinned Toilet
If you want to invest a bit for something meaningful, why not twin a toilet? For £60 he'll get a cool certificate to hang in the bog and you'll have contributed to providing a few more people with a better chance at clean water and sanitation.  www.toilettwinning.org/

3) Poo Pourri 

You may have heard of the Before You Go Toilet Spray from their viral video a couple years ago. They offer a range of Manly scents including:

Pootonium, Nature's Call, and Crap Shooter. 

4) Bum Fodder: The Absorbing History of Toilet Paper

Another wonderfully charming book... for the dad who likes the history of every-day objects. It's also perfect for reading on the Loo! Buy on Amazon


5) Cellar Door Membership

If your dad is the classy sort who likes a cocktail now and again, why not gift him a membership to Cellar Door? £39 buys a years worth of discounts, offers, a birthday bottle of bubbles, and of course access to some amazing loos at the grooviest bar on Aldwych.  Buy Membership Here


6) Thomas Crapper Bling

Thomas Crapper remains one of the most iconic names in toilet provision, and there are loads of options to celebrate the name including: Toilet Roll, Emergency Plumbing Kit, Toilet Signs... or if you want to go full-out check out Thomas Crapper & Company for complete bathroom sets! www.thomas-crapper.com


7) Loo Tours Gift Certificate

And of course how could we not end by tooting our own horn with the shameless self-plug? Loo Tours Gift Certificates are available for any number of attendees at lootours.com/home/gift-certificates.html

Please note, Loo Tours cannot take responsibility for ruined relationships resulting from misguided attempts at humour. Make sure your dad will appreciate toiletalia before you give it to him! 

An Adventure in Victorian Sewage

 

The Crossness Pumping station is one of London's hidden gems of Victorian Engineering at its finest. Several times a year they have a steaming day where they turn on the mighty Beam Engine that once pumped 12 tonnes of sewage with every rotation. It rotates 11 times a minute. You do the maths! It doesn't pump anything any more, but is still magnificant to watch.

On Sunday I headed out (via shuttle-but from Bexleyheath Station) to see the place for myself.

If you're not familiar with what a pumping station is simplest terms in which I have heard it explained are as follows:

For sewage to get to its final resting place gravity needs to do its thing. But there's only so far down you can go. So if it has a long journey it needs to be brought back up so that it can go down again.  

Not being an engineer that's about as thoroughly as I understand the concept myself, so the rest of this explanation is compiled at great pains with help from my engineer friends, the Trust's website. If you want to nerd out over a more thorough description, check out the history section of Crossness.org.uk 

When you visit, you enter a large hall, which on this occasion was full of exhibitions for a local fair. Volunteers in costume (ranging from proper Victorian to a pastiche of Steam-Punk) were everywhere.

The most impressive site for any visitor  is the Grade 1 listed Beam Engine Room. Beam engines, I was told, are a bit of a lost art. They just don't make them like that anymore. The four at Crossness are (possibly) the largest remaining in the world, with 52 Ton fly wheels, and 47 Ton beams. It's all diesel now. they actually have a diesel engine room next door, but those are sitting unloved at the moment, as they aren't vinage.) 

The Prince Consort Engine has been restored, and is the one that is used on steaming days. I had the great honour of getting to turn it on. This involved flipping a switch at just the right moment, under the instruction of a top-hatted gentleman and then rotating a large wheel 2 and a half times. Actually apparently you can do it much more practically with a much smaller wheel, but that looks less impressive in photographs, so the wheel is very much for the benefit of visiting Royalty. This means I have touched the very same wheel as Prince Charles... but any royal DNA has probably rubbed off of me by now... I contemplated never washing my hands again, but given the environment that didn't seem a good idea. 

It's actually not just Prince Charles... there are a long line of illustrious folk who have graced the engine room with their presence. According to the website:  

The Southern Outfall Works, as the complex was originally called, was officially opened on April 4th 1865, by HRH The Prince of Wales (later Edward VII), attended by Prince Alfred, the Duke of Cambridge, Prince Edward of Saxe-Weimar, the Archbishops of Canterbury and of York and the Lord Mayor of London, and many other persons of rank.

Following an address by Joseph Bazalgette, the Royal party toured the works and reservoirs, and the Prince then turned the wheel which started the engines and, as the Illustrated London News observed, "a sensible vibration was felt throughout the building, showing that the enormous beams, lifting-rods and flywheels were in operation" Following that, in the true Victorian spirit, the "Prince and five hundred guests sat down to an excellent dejeuner, in one of the ancillary sheds, beside the Engine House" (now the Fitting Shop).

Even for those who don't know or care about engineering the room is worth a visit for the sumptuous decoration. Stunning cast iron work and motifs of daisies and figs are all around, draping themselves over the regal red and gold lattice-work. The figs are a bit of a joke actually... they are one of the best fruits to ease the opening of the bowels. Yet another example of the wonderful comedy of Victorian decency loosely masking a very shrewd sense of humour. 

Unfortunately, though the exteriors are gorgeous, less attention would have been given at the time to what went on inside the pipes in the 1800's. The concern of the time was getting raw sewage away from the population of London, as a response to the Great Stink of 1858. But they hadn't got as far as treating it, so the raw sewage still made its way back into the river. Sedimentation tanks were only added in 1891. The reservoirs emptied with the tide of the Thames and carried off out to sea. Thanks to advancements in regulations and technology water is now cleaned much more thoroughly and is much safer (they say our drinking water has been through at least 7 sets of kidneys before it gets to London, and it doesn't seem to do most of us any harm!)

The building has been a film star on many occasions (featuring in Sherlock Holmes, and an upcoming 2015 release that they're not supposed to talk about, but involves a cupboard, a monster and Daniel Radcliffe) and is apparently the setting for a scene in a video game (The Getaway: Black Monday). I did think as I wandered round it that it was an awfully perfect place for an action thriller. So many moving parts to duck through, things to climb, swing and jump from and... heaven forbid... to smash. It's the sort of place you'd get a final showdown à la Zorro or Pirates of the Carribean... lots of things to climb on, swing from, get caught in, smash, and use as found weaponry.

In a fitting connection between Arts and Engineering Sir Peter Bazalgette, the current Chair of Arts Council England, is a direct descendant of Joseph Bazalgette. He is also president of the Crossness Trust, so staying connected to his heritage. More notably he is the man responsible for Chanel 4's Big Brother, which leads to reflections on which direction the respective Bazalgettes pumped shit.

With luck and the energy of the volunteers Crossness has plans to grow as a visitor attraction over the next few years. They are working on ways to make it easier to get to, and plan to increase the number of steaming days.

Meantime, the dates for the rest of the year are 22nd June, 27th July, 31st August and 12th October. Visitors are very strongly recommended not to wear heels, as they will go right through the holes in the upstairs platform (much to the amusement of everyone else.)

If I can swing it there may be a Loo Tours adventure out there at some point as well. You can stay up to date on any developments on my e-mail list. 

Poonami: Disaster as entertainment

Fascinating to follow the events of yesterday evening:

A sewage leak in South London has sparked waves of interest, largely due to the nature of the coverage. On twitter two hashtags are trending: #Londonpoo and #poonami. Those not directly involved are having a ball making puns about the "shitty situation" and "mind the crap" announcements on the underground.

Now Hear This (a London news entertainment and culture blog for Time Out) has just picked it up. And this is what interests me the most. It has become entertainment. London's most exciting event of yesterday. And this is what interests me most.

Why do we have so much fun with this? The chance to make a big deal out of a "crappy disaster" is irrationally pleasing (I admit even to me.)

And, maybe more telling, why this case in particular?

The answer I think is partly that we don't perceive it as a disaster... which at the moment it isn't. The sentiment seems to be that it is a bit of flooding that may ruin a few carpets, but no homes will be destroyed, and the people there are affluent enough to deal with it ("aren't there a few politicians living near there? How fitting!") Okay, and maybe pose a few health risks. It is, after all, raw sewage.

Somehow it gets more attention than the world-wide state of sanitation, where some people are living in a constant state of poo-nami. Children who walk through diseased open-defication grounds, tracking particles of fecal matter into the house, getting it on their hands, which in turn touches the food that goes into their mouths.

For those who haven't already seen it, Rose George's TedTalk 'Let's Talk Crap. Seriously.' sums up very neatly the short leap from a joke to a serious life threatening state of affairs.




What interests me is not getting rid of the joke. Keep it!!! It is not only part of how people deal with a challenge, but has got the event far wider coverage than a serious news story could ever do!

The million dollar question is can the humour and irreverence be leveraged to create genuine awareness and get people working on an issue. Or is is inherently dismissive? It's almost the sort of thing that the World Toilet Organization and Toilet Hackers work with. It would be interesting to see one of them adopt the phrase and see how far they could run with it!