written and posted by members of Lancashire Dead Good Poets' Society

Wednesday 29 June 2022

Journey

I don’t know about you but when I’m planning a journey to a strange town or city I do like to know where the Castle is, where the theatres are, where the shops are but nowadays I also want to know where the loos are and very few, if any, travel guide pamphlets tell you this vital information. Why not?

Public Inconvenience?
But first of all let’s a have a quick look at why these vital facilities have been drastically reduced in number over the last decade or so. I suppose it’s no surprise that the main reason is that public toilet provision is not mandatory for councils and over the last years of recessions, cuts and austerity they were an easy target. A recent report states that the UK was one of the first countries to put them in, in a systematic way. In another it says that more and more of us are learning to hold it in, especially people like postal workers and lorry drivers. But this is bad for our health. It can exacerbate existing medical problems, to say nothing of the fact that it’s simply not a pleasant sensation when we need to go, and can’t. They are not called a Public Convenience for no reason.

I asked ‘Why not?’ at the end of the first paragraph and that is still true of paper pamphlets. However, I was looking to plan a journey to Leicester not long ago, a place I’d never been to before and I remembered the following sites:

The first is called The Great British Toilet Map. You need a smart phone or device for this but the idea is it gives you the map of this country and you can move and hover over the place you are going to or are in and then you enlarge the place and it gives a mark on the actual street map where the toilets are. The project aims to map all publicly-accessible toilets - that means all toilets that the public can access without needing to be a customer.

These include:
Public toilets
Train and bus stations
Service stations/shopping centres
Public buildings
Toilets in other buildings where the business agrees that the public can enter.

https://www.toiletmap.org.uk/

The second site is called pee.place and again you will need access to a smart phone or device but you could download the information from your computer before you go. This site allows you to put in a query about places around the world in the top left corner. I’ve just put in Melbourne and the map of the city streets comes up with all the toilets marked. And there are a lot of them compared to Birmingham.

https://pee.place/en

But what for the future. I want to be able to journey somewhere, anywhere in this country and know that if I need to spend a penny then it will not be a problem. The Royal Society for Public Health put forward a set of proposals back in 2019 to make the provision of public toilets compulsory on a well planned and regulated basis which would include laws, such as in America and Canada, to ensure fair provision for women.

Japanese Public Toilet
So far I have come across individual cities such as Sheffield and Bristol where campaigns have been undertaken to provide toilet facilities but surely a national campaign needs to take place.

I find writing haiku difficult. Maybe this works.

closed doors
she walks to the park 
snowdrops weep

Thanks for reading, Terry Q.

6 comments:

Anonymous said...

This is thought provoking Terry - public toilets are truly an issue … oh the amount of times I’ve gone in the woods… poem brilliant as always. :)

Mel Pearce said...

Health experts are always advising us we should be drinking more water. Perhaps a tax on water utility companies could help fund a national Public Conveniences upgrade.

Laxmiben Hirani said...

Terry, you have hit the nail on the head a sudden rush goes for everyone does not matter who we are. We are in the same boat. Sadly, many public toilets have been closed on the high street, but you can find a men, women and disabled toilets in shopping halls, malls all due to lack of funding thee one cubicles on the streets are closed down and taken apart. An essential part of our life....It has come to asking nicely if you can use their toilet walking into a place that you would not think of in the time of need you could be faced with a nasty person but not everyone in this country is like this. It is an issue very empowering to get our local councils to put these places back up and run as the pressure should not be only on Public Health. The council's all look at how much money they make from these stand alone one toilets, if not enough money even though we pay to spend a penny or two they will not care but take it out from the face of this earth, not thinking it is an important and essential part for the community and visitors as well. Your post really touched my heart and soul and I will write to not just our government but our Public Health department on this issue and tweet them as I am H.I.M & HRH, I fully well know the last thing they have on their minds is public toilets but it is extremely important just as everything else that effects us in daily life with all the work I do I will make sure this is addressed but do not think it will happen overnight as we are really strapped for cash in all areas, as in many areas it was freely available to give but not anymore since COVID came that has destroyed millions of lives and the cost of living crisis thanks to Putin the psychopath.

Billy Banter said...

yellow tears?

Steve Rowland said...

When planning a journey to a strange town or city I like to know where the bookshops and record stores are. I couldn't care less about the loos - yet. However, I recognise I may be in a minority and it is a scandal that better provision is not made in this country for public 'relief'. We were once pioneers in this social provision but have gone backwards in the last 50 years, so your blog is rightly indignant. Of course it's no longer a case of spending a penny...20p seems to have been the 'going rate' for a long time; but a pocket full of 20ps is of no use if there aren't the amenities to spend them in. And yes, your poem works.👍

Malcolm Drysdale said...

Thank you Terry Quinn - worth it for the website links alone, though I enjoyed your blog and little poem too.