Cuts make councils pull the chain on a great British convenience

LONDON LETTER:IT WAS not supposed to be like this. Prime minister David Cameron wanted local authorities to wage a relentless war on the salaries of top executives, wasteful spending and administration costs.

Instead, it seems some authorities have focused their opening fire on the remaining stock of public lavatories – which have fallen in number, by over 40 per cent in the last decade.

Manchester City Council last week decided that it would close all but one of its 17 public lavatories, claiming that the public do not like them and prefer to use the facilities of shops, pubs and hotels.

In Edinburgh, the ruling Lib Dem/SNP coalition announced last month that they would shut half their 30 lavatories and abandon plans to spend £400,000 on refurbishment – a key Lib Dem election pledge.

The public lavatory is a British invention, first thought up by George Jennings in 1851 when he charged visitors to the Great Exhibition at the Crystal Palace in Hyde Park to use his cubicles.

The invention provoked outrage, but Jennings won out, with 852,000 people “spending a penny” for their ease and comfort, thus adding a new phrase to the English language.

In the following year, the first permanent purpose-built public toilet opened in Aldwych, near Charing Cross, while the creations became more and more ornate as the rest of the Victorian century played out.

Some have become architectural icons. One of the first to be listed by planners, the Market Place in Kingston-upon-Hull has eight slate stalls with marble and glass cisterns and four cubicles with “part-fluted Ionic columns between the doors”, say admirers.

Even today, the popularity of properly run facilities continues. Richard Chisnell of the British Toilet Association points out that 15 million people visit Westminster’s 55 public conveniences in central London every year – three times the population of Scotland.

Some, like the one on Broadwick Street in Soho, even became famous, after John Lennon stood outside to greet Peter Cook and Dudley Moore, pretending to be a commissionaire at a gentlemen’s club, in a 1960s TV comedy.

Even Westminster’s efforts fail in the face of the crowds of people who throng the West End at weekends, leading officials to order in a dozen temporary toilets over manhole covers.

Waging a lonely fight to persuade officialdom of the usefulness of public loos, Chisnell, whose British Toilet Association runs “The Loo of The Year Award”, predicts that the drastic fall in numbers will continue. “We have lost 30 to 40 per cent of our public toilets in the past 10 years and we estimate there are only 4,000 left. There are more sexy things in life than a public toilet, but we all need to go for a pee,” he says.

Notting Hill is, however, trying to buck the trend, with the Emerald Isle public convenience near Portobello Road, where locals dreamed up the idea to include a flower kiosk in the design, modelled by architect Piers Gough on “the sleek lines of a Victorian steam yacht”.

The revenue from the Emerald Isle’s flower sales goes toward the upkeep of the toilets and the pay of a full-time attendant.

“Public loos are a necessary part of a civilised world,” Gough says, “They should be something that gives civic pride, as well as something that provides some income and other things such as benches and rest spaces.” Privately, ministers complain that Labour councils are picking soft targets – such as libraries, public lavatories, elderly home-help – as part of their battle to persuade the public that everything is the fault of Whitehall.

Besides closing 16 public toilets, Manchester City Council is shutting 36 nurseries, 20 youth centres, five libraries, two sports centres, two swimming pools, and making 2,000 staff redundant.

However, some of the council’s other past spending is used by the government to buttress its argument that there is widespread waste in council offices, including the translation into Urdu of a guide to feeding pigeons.

Equally, it points to Manchester’s decision in 2009 to spend £8,000 on 5,000 copies of a sex guide for the over-50s, which included a “sexy movie” and “an extraordinary and misguided pamphlet”.

Indeed, by their actions on public lavatories shall ye know them, or partly so at any rate. In Birmingham, run by a Conservative-Lib Dem coalition now cutting £300 million, no public toilets are to close, boasts Paul Tilsley, the council’s deputy leader. However, the city has few left to save.

In Sheffield, deputy prime minister Nick Clegg’s political base, the Lib Dem-controlled council points to Manchester as an example of the worst kind of cost-cutting, as it pledged to close no services, though it would restrict opening hours.

However, it is not just Labour-dominated councils that are rebelling.

Liberal Democrats councillors protested about the decision to impose most of the spending cuts’ pain this year.

David Cameron's annus horribilishas started badly, and it will get worse.