Toilet Talk
If the eyes are the window to the soul, the public toilet is a finger up society's colon.
Fuck, I need to shit. Fuck.
I scan the pub. I’m wedged into the corner of a small, raised seating area. A group of my closest friends are shouting drunkenly in the general direction of the screen. There’s no clear toilet sign anywhere. My girlfriend, at the far end of the table, clocks my discomfort. My eyes, reflecting the electric green glow of Turf Moor, are basically a plea: help me. She reads my mind and points me towards the stairs.
I shuffle my way out from the corner I’ve wedged myself in and dart towards them. I stumble around, guided by the waft of human waste. I can smell the toilet before I can see it. Like a shit-seeking basset hound, I follow my nose, open the door, and I’m greeted by the worst toilet I’ve ever seen.
A man stands over the bowl in the only cubicle, hacking up what is presumably a lung. Splat. Again: splat. No customary splash. He leaves and, as he’s washing his hands, he gives me a pitying look. Don’t fucking pity me. You did this too.
I step into the cubicle. Before me is a sight from the depths of hell. I won’t pain you with the details, but I will say this: if this is one man’s work, God help him. If this is three men’s work, God help them. If this is every man’s work? God help us all.
I guess needs must.
Here’s what we pretend: nobody shits. Not really. Not in public. We eat in public, drink in public, cry in public. But shit? That happens somewhere else, in private and to other people. The polite social contract requires we maintain this fiction together.
The public toilet is the only space in civic life that exists entirely to serve your body and yet is treated as though the body is the problem. This isn’t a new arrangement. When Victorian cities first started building public toilets, they built them almost exclusively for men. Women weren’t expected to be in public long enough to need one. Urban planner Clara Greed calls the consequence the “urinary leash”, women’s participation in public life literally constrained by their bladders. You could go out. You just couldn’t stay out. The toilet, or absence thereof, was doing the work of keeping certain “bodies” in their place long before we had to say it out loud. Molotch and Noren, academics who have, bravely I think, dedicated serious intellectual energy to the study of public toilets, describe them as sitting ‘at the intersection of most private acts and the most public spaces.’ Which is a very dignified way of saying: nowhere makes a society’s hypocrisies more visible than the room it pretends doesn’t exist.
We tend to think of things like plumbing only when it fails. The same is true of the public toilet. Invisible until broken. Noticed only in a crisis. But that invisibility is doing a lot of work. It’s a recurring answer to a recurring question: whose body is welcome here?
Sometime between 2010 and now, the powers that be in this country decided that going to the toilet was a privilege you had to earn, rather than a basic accommodation for the fact that human bodies produce waste with some regularity and indifference to your financial situation. If you can’t pay, then cross your legs and think of England.
The Conservative government of the 2010s didn’t announce a war on public toilets. They didn’t need to. They just stopped funding them, and like with many things during austerity, watched councils make impossible choices and let the invisible hand of the market fill the gap. Once the invisible hand of the market can wipe my arse, I'll believe it has my interests at heart.
Britain lost roughly half its public toilets between 1995 and 2013. The government’s eventual response, in the form of the Public Lavatories Act 2021, was a business rates relief for remaining facilities. Not new toilets, a tax break. The solution to disappearing public infrastructure under the Tory government was, as ever, a financial instrument that helps the people who already have something, keep it.
The market’s solution, for those who can’t afford to buy their way into Costa, is to simply not exist in public. Consider: Crohn’s & Colitis UK issues something called a Just Can’t Wait card. It is a small card, roughly the size of a credit card, that people with inflammatory bowel disease carry to prove to shop owners and café staff that their need to use a toilet is medically urgent. Read that again. In 2026, people are carrying documentation asserting their right to shit. We have outsourced public provision so completely that people now need to show credentials to perform a basic bodily function. The urinary leash, it turns out, has several attachments.
What if you can't pay? I'm lucky. I'm part of the London metropolitan elite. I can absorb the £2 toilet tax and call it character building. But what if you're one of the roughly 300,000 people experiencing homelessness in the UK on any given night? Well, under the Civic Government (Scotland) Act 1982, urinating in public in Scotland can result in a fine. Failure to pay that fine can result in a warrant. A warrant, if you have no address and no money, has a way of becoming something worse. Which means that in a city that has watched its public toilets close, you can be criminalised for your body's response to having nowhere to go. This isn't a failure of the system. It is the system. A policy that consistently produces the same outcome is working exactly as designed.
To understand why Britain's toilets became political battlegrounds, you need to go back to the 60s, to a time when the sexual revolution was in full swing and somehow still managed to leave gay men behind. To a time when the only place two men could safely be queer together was somewhere the state preferred to pretend didn’t exist. Unglamorous, surveilled and paradoxically one of the only available venues.
The word cottaging has a charming pastoral quality entirely at odds with what it describes. For the uninitiated, it is the practice of gay men using public toilets as meeting places at a time when meeting anywhere else could get you arrested.
The Wolfenden Report wasn't commissioned out of liberal principle. It was commissioned because the establishment was embarrassed. After theatre darling and recently knighted John Gielgud was convicted for cottaging in Chelsea. In 1957, it made what felt like a liberal argument: ‘there must remain a realm of private morality and immorality which is, in brief crude terms, not the law’s business.’ A concession, of sorts. Except that public toilets weren’t private. So, they never got that mercy.
The state's response to visible queerness wasn't to create safer private spaces. It was to make the public ones more dangerous. Jeffrey Poulter documents how police forces deployed what became known as "pretty police," officers sent specifically into public toilets to manufacture homosexual offences. Not to prevent harm. Not to respond to complaints. To produce arrests, on demand, to a quota. The cottage wasn't policed because it was dangerous. It was policed because it was there, and because it was one of the only places it was possible to be, and because that possibility was intolerable. When councils eventually bricked up the problem toilets, they didn’t frame it as what it was: the erasure of a rare queer social space under the cover of public decency. They called it cleaning up. What they cleaned up was the only free toilet for everyone else. Two birds, one brick wall.
People say that history repeats itself. I tend to disagree. It does however seem to act as an awful reboot that no one asked for, using the same beloved characters and same props in an attempt to manufacture some kind of nostalgia for intellectual property of the past. Swap ‘gay men’ for ‘trans women.’ Swap ‘vice’ for ‘safeguarding.’ Keep the toilet. Keep the panic. Keep the absolute certainty that x needs protecting from the wrong kind of y and you have your refitted reboot. Moral Panic, the next generation now streaming on HBO Max.
This isn't a metaphor. In 2025, For Women Scotland took the Scottish Government to the Supreme Court, partly over questions of who is entitled to use which toilet. Official guidance from the Equality and Human Rights Commission has had to address, in formal statutory language, the question of which bodies belong in which cubicles.
The script is so familiar it’s almost boring. A marginalised group is identified. A public toilet is designated as the site of imagined threat. Official bodies convene. Think pieces are written. The marginalised group continues, largely, to need the toilet for the same reason everyone else does. JK Rowling managed to imagine a school bathroom containing a weeping ghost who mildly sexually harasses a 14-year-old boy, a troll smashing up the cubicles, and a basilisk capable of killing you with eye contact. But her limit, it turns out, is trans women
This time the panic has better infrastructure. The EHRC's single-sex spaces guidance, For Women Scotland's litigation, parliamentary debates about the Gender Recognition Act etc. The machinery that once relied on 'pretty police' now has lawyers and press offices. Every US state that studied the impact of gender-inclusive bathroom access found no increase in safety incidents. The documented evidence for the threat is vanishingly small. In neither case does the evidence stack up. In both cases, nobody cares. The toilet is too good a stage.
The bog remains the bogeyman factory.
While Britain was busy litigating the question of who deserves a toilet, nobody checked whether the toilets were usable.
Somewhere in Britain right now, there is a 'disabled toilet' with a mop in it. Elsewhere in the same building, a group of people got into a circle, patted each other on the back, and put a sticker on the door: 'We Are Proud to Be an Accessible Venue.' The mop has not been consulted.
The Changing Places campaign exists to point out what should not require a campaign to point out: standard disabled toilets require users to be able to transfer independently. Tens of thousands of people in the UK cannot use standard disabled toilets at all. People with profound disabilities. Those who use ceiling hoists. Those who need adult-sized changing tables. The accessible toilet is only accessible to a very specific, very convenient kind of disability.
When a council closes the "problem" park toilet, the one that needed policing, the one that embarrassed everyone, the one that was being used in ways the council preferred not to think about - it does not imagine it is closing a toilet that matters to respectable people. But it is also closing the only step-free, ground-floor facility on that side of town. The person who needed it for one reason and the person who needed it for another are not always different people. And now neither of them can stay out past eight. Now everyone loses. Somewhere, a politician is congratulating themselves on fiscal responsibility. The mop remains.
I grew up just outside Bradford and went to a fairly progressive school. Gender neutral bathrooms, decent disabled access, the works. We largely got it right. I say largely because even the most enlightened institution cannot fully account for what beasts thirteen-year-old boys can be. At the end of one particular assembly, our headteacher dismissed the girls, kept the boys back, and gravely informed us that someone had thrown a poo across a cubicle. He wanted the culprit to own up.
Reader, they did not own up.
What did he imagine was going to happen? That somewhere in that hall, a boy would rise slowly to his feet, meet his gaze across the room, and declare: I’m Sharticus?
His parting words, delivered with the full weight of a man who has seen things he cannot unsee, were simply: "Boys. Do better."
I have tried, Mr Horn. I genuinely have.
The problem is that doing better, in this country, is largely optional and largely aesthetic. I spent a significant portion of my teenage years in pub toilets that looked like crime scenes and felt, somehow, like freedom. The sticky floor. The graffiti. At times bordering on philosophy. At others, the mindless scribblings of a thousand lonely, horny teenagers. The sense that this small, disgusting room existed entirely outside the rules that governed everywhere else. Meet Me in the Bathroom. That's a Strokes album, a cultural moment, a whole identity built on the premise that chosen filth is character. Glastonbury charges you £350 to queue for a portaloo and calls it an experience. ‘Jonty please don’t drop Mummy’s hummus down the toilet’.
Filth is charming when you're economically equipped to leave. It reads as authentic, anti-establishment, a little bit rock and roll. The identical toilet in a council estate park is evidence of social decay. The difference isn't the state of the toilet. It's whether you can afford the £12 spicy margarita that grants you access to it.
Boys. Do better.
We have spent thirty years debating whose body is welcome in which cubicle. We have spent the same thirty years making the cubicles uninhabitable for everyone. The public toilet is, it turns out, perfectly designed: it excludes exactly who it was always meant to exclude, and it does it in a room that smells bad enough that no one wants to look too closely.
I made it, for what it's worth. I used the toilet. I guess needs must. But I've been thinking about it ever since.
You don’t need a white paper to know what a country believes in. Just try spending a day in its city centre without buying anything and see if you’re allowed to piss. If the eyes are the window to the soul, the public toilet is a finger up Britain’s back passage: boarded up, padlocked, and marked 'Out of Order - Due to You People.'
Written by George Trueman
