Council should shut all the loos

11:50am Friday 4th April 2008

Comments (10)   Have your say »

IN THE days of old it was acceptable for women to urinate in the street. Skirts were so long and rigid, so all they did was stand over a drain cover and "spend a penny".

As fashion progressed and skirts got shorter, this practice stopped. However, the council at the time realised that public toilets were needed, and the first public toilets in York were opened in Silver Street, which is ironic considering that the replacement for Splash Palace could be located there too.

Local authorities, including York, do not have to provide public toilets, but it is done purely as the "right thing to do".

When I started at the council, there were toilets at Clifton Green, Clarence Street, Holgate Road, Lord Mayor's Walk and Haxby Road. Thinking back to childhood, I remember the toilets underneath what is now Yates's Wine Lodge and a toilet at each of the Bar Wall entrances, all now gone.

With this in mind, I suggest the council bites the bullet and saves a fortune by closing every public toilet in the city. Why have something they don't need to provide?

Year on year, regardless of who is in power, the toilets come under scrutiny. If it's not tourists whinging, it's residents - add the tourist board sticking its nose in and an investigation by The Press follows.

Let's cut to the chase. A public toilet is exactly that, a public toilet. No member of society is turned away, from the city gent to the smelly tramp, access is always allowed, the council does not erect signs on the toilet doors saying "these toilets are for patrons only".

Many letters to The Press have highlighted druggies' injecting and loitering in Parliament Street toilets. The council addressed this and installed ultraviolet light in the gents, which stopped addicts from finding a vein in their arms. True to form, people complained it was too dingy, so back to square one.

Then consider the smell. Waste from the ladies toilet in Parliament Street goes down and on its way passes the gents, which is underground. Add female waste to male waste and you have a marriage made in heaven en route to the main sewer. Of course it is going to smell.

Then we have the consumables, loo roll, soap, hand towels and so on. All these cost money, as does the electricity and wages, not to mention the price of repairing damage caused by vandalism.

I have no idea what yearly amount is spent on the upkeep of the toilets, but I reckon closing them all would go a long way to providing something worthwhile for residents.

I am 100 per cent in favour of the idea of asking shops to make their toilets available for all and sundry. However, I wouldn't pay them for the privilege, as has been suggested.

Shopkeepers have moaned about public toilets in the past. Let's see how they like shelling out for loo rolls and extra cleans. More importantly, let's see how they react to complaints and how long before the "patrons only" signs go up.

Paul Willey writes in a personal capacity, and not on behalf of City of York Council. Paul works for the council as head of a street cleaning team.