The inconvenient truth about the decline of London's public loos

How very inconvenient — images have emerged of Peter Mandelson appearing to relieve himself against a wall after visiting George Osborne's house in Notting Hill. If only there had been a public facility nearby, he would have been saved the embarrassment. The irony is that he made a great exhibition of himself thanks to the absence of an invention first showcased at the Great Exhibition of 1851. That Victorian extravaganza was home to many firsts: the first major display of photography; the first demonstration of mechanical cooling (foreshadowing modern fridges); and the world’s first large-scale prefabricated building. It was also the first time that the public could use flushing lavatories — more than 800,000 people paid a penny for the experience, hence the phrase. The man responsible was George Jennings, an engineer and master plumber.

- BY JOHN DARLINGTON

But the public loo is not a British invention. What have the Romans ever done for us? Well, they created the earliest recorded communal latrines in the second century BCE. Much later, in the 1830s, Paris led with vespasienne —cast-iron modesty screens that brought sanitation to the boulevards but left little to the imagination. London, naturally, went one better: it buried its facilities underground, tiled them like chapels, charged for them and staffed them with an attendant.

After the Great Exhibition of 1851, the city had been grappling with what contemporaries called “the Great Stink” — the combination of human waste, overflowing cesspits and Thames pollution that made the city unliveable. The newly formed Metropolitan Board of Works, established in 1855, was charged with cleaning up the capital's infrastructure.

Jennings seized his moment. Flushed with his success at the Great Exhibition, he began lobbying for the municipal adoption of pay-as-you-go public lavatories, presenting them not as luxuries but as integral to urban health. The Board approved his plans and soon his first permanent facilities were built at the Royal Exchange, followed by others on Fleet Street, the Strand and Oxford Street.

Miniature porcelain palaces