Caught short in the city of steel bladders

It is always wonderful to find a public loo that's
well maintained and free. Thanks and praise be to
Westminster City Council for keeping this one at
the north end of Queensway open.

You only get to know the true meaning of "desperate" when you're an old bloke with limited cash and a weak bladder looking for somewhere to relieve yourself in London.

It happens so often that you begin almost unconsciously to limit your excursions and explorations to areas where you know you can get to a toilet easily and quickly.

Last week, doing what used to be a quite frequent stroll around the Dalston and Hoxton area, I quickly realised I no longer knew where to go.

No doubt apps exist which direct you straight to the nearest urinal....but ancient phone can only run a couple of apps at any given moment.

You could ask a policeman? Don't think so, especially now so many cops look like intergalactic stormtroopers with their big guns and armour.

So, what happens most often these days, you're forced to go into a pub, see if it's possible to slink into their loos without anyone noticing....and if not, buying a half of something. In my case, embarrassment prohibits the most obvious behaviour - asking the bar staff if they'd mind...in case they did.

So you end up temporarily relieved, but 20 minutes later that half of nasty lager is already tickling the nerve ends of your confused and inefficient bladder.

You could try a café, but be warned quite a few of the big-name chains keep their bogs locked; you have to beg for a key, which in the case of one such bar near St James Piccadilly, was attached to a massive chunk of heavy timber. Honestly, it is outrageous: charge £2.50 for maybe 20p worth of coffee, then don't make allowance for the highly diuretic effects of caffeine.

And whatever happened to those much-heralded scheme to pay private businesses (pubs, cafés etc) to allow the general public to use their loos? If anyone ever actually had satisfaction from one of these schemes, which were in the news about 15 years ago, do let us know.

When all else fails we often end up doing what an increasing number of desperate humans do in this city which no longer recognises any duty of care to the public - we find a dark, quiet (and usually very stinky) corner.

What's going on there? What is it with this crazy city, where even the most basic, pitiable needs of the elderly and weak-bladdered are turned into an opportunity to torment and humiliate, then part them from their cash?

London was one of the first big cities to introduce public toilets back in the mid-19th century, but then as now it was seen by many as an opportunity to turn a profit. Hence the phrase "to spend a penny". Mind you, in those days they did give their clients a superior piddling experience for their pennies.

It was still a penny when I was a kid - one of those big pre-decimal pennies that you dropped through a slot in the lock of the heavy green door to give you access to the WC. Urinals were usually free.

Now you're lucky to get a wee for less than 50p - although the recent brilliant decision to liberate toilets at the railway termini was a massive victory for common sense, health and decency.

Are we at last waking up from a 50 year slumber in which we allowed councils to close dozens of magnificent old loos, with their beautiful tiles and mosaic floors and brass fittings and stained glass?

These underground temples to the gods of excretion were a product of the Victorians' new found understanding of the importance of public hygiene; and also a desire to avoid, at all costs, the horror of men - and yes, women too -  pissing in the street. But, as so often, their efforts went way beyond the purely functional:  many of the public toilets built in the late 19th century were ridiculously ornate, expensively decorated with beautiful tiled floors, solid brass fittings, stained glass light-panes and mature oak seats.

There is a wonderful website - one of the absolute best - called Derelict London.
One of its most fascinating and indeed thrilling sections is devoted to derelict public conveniences.
They are exhaustively catalogued, with hi-res photos showing the extent of the vandalism which has been sanctioned for so long.

Once one of London's most beautiful subterranean loos -
the Chancery Lane conveniences - have fallen into this sorry
state, after being closed down back in the 90s. Good
lord, City of London Corporation, at least give this
rotting corpse a decent burial!

And yet, these places survive. They were built to last and last they did - through two wars and bombing raids - until in the 60s and 70s they were left to rot, and went into a rapid decline.

Councils no longer thought it necessary to employ attendants for every loo; rather than repair damage to the beautiful craftsmanship, the old tiles were often covered with cladding. In some men's loos, sheets of metal were erected between stalls, to discourage cottaging (See Broadwick Street gents, in Soho).

In some but not all cases, the underground loos were they replaced by those ugly and scary dalek-shaped  huts - self-cleaning loos, they were supposed to be. If you had the 20 or 50p required to use them, you then took a gamble on whether the sliding door would work, or decide to slide open mid-performance.

More recently, some of these subterranean caves of delightful convenience have been sold off, privatised to re-open as - believe it - bars and restaurants.

A beautiful, witty, useful and sadly short-lived idea...the
Kennington Cross ArtsLav. Need to check out if this is still
open...

One of the first to do so was outside the Hawksmoor church in Spitalfields. Another was the stinky gents at Clapham Common underground station, now just another eating and drinking place called, amusingly, Joe Public ( so presumably they kept some of the loos working).

Another old convenience had a different fate - the toilets at Kennington Cross in Lambeth famously became the  Artslav exhibition space in 2005. But that seems to have gone now too.

On a recent visit to Portobello Road, it was a really surprising delight to find that the Talbot Road conveniences were once again open and free to use. This is quite a gem in its way, with lovely tiled floors: the real joy (apart from the obvious physical relief) felt on using these loos was that they seemed just the same as they had about 20 years ago: no charge, no annoying notices, no bragging from any council or charity; no welded steel sheets; no turnstiles.

Thank you Portobello Road for giving me this relief,
and the free aesthetic high of once again walking over
that beautiful mosaic tiled floor (Talbot Street Lavs,
 London West 11)

It's obviously a great asset for the the market, which welcomes thousands of tourists from all over every weekend. Open up and liberate all those other locked and chained public loos across the city still in public ownership - can't the Mayor add this to his list of responsibilities? It would surely be a massive vote winner for Sadiq, as well as providing endless opportunities for witty pre-election sloganeering.

Meanwhile, like many thousands of other London street-crawlers, I will continue to rely on building my own mental map of free pee-ing places. They include, of course, public libraries (but even these are not always a good bet in these days of PFI-style operations); museums and art galleries (but it is such a shame that you might be forced to walk into the National Gallery with the sole genuine purpose of needing to take a leak, rather than wanting to check out a Holbein or a Vermeer); and, if you have the nerve and the swagger, any one of London's multitude of posh west-end hotel lobbies.

It is still shocking that some of the loos in Hyde Park and Kensington Gardens charge for use; but the ones by the Serpentine Lido do not. Veteran Covent Garden frequenters might remember the wonderful and entertaining free public toilets neside St Paul's Church in the Piazza; memories of cheerful attendants and operatic music as you went about your business. Now, you have to pay - and on weekends, queue and then pay.

So,  praise and cheers for those who - against so much pressure, comparable indeed to bladder pressure at that - are keeping a few really useful public loos open. Huge praise, for example, to the staff at Finchley Road, Highbury and Islington, and New Cross stations - for keeping a free toilets open for all sexes. If these stations can do it - why not all the others?

Anyone who stands to be London mayor in the future must surely be asked to promise that - on their watch - every overground and underground station in the the Greater London area must have working, open, clean toilets for everyone! ENd of manifesto-style moan.....


Postscript: How encouraging, a couple of days after this was written, to open the May 2018 edition of the Brixton Bugle community newspaper and to find half a page devoted to a map of public conveniences in the Brixton area. There are plenty there that are new to me - but it is also accurate , showing for example that (very sadly) you now have to pay 20p to go into the formerly lifesaving Pope's Road toilets. No wonder they're complaining about people pissing in the street in the Electric Avenue area!

The Troubadour to be sold because locals want to sleep? Please tell me this is a July fools' day joke…..

I read a story in (what else?) the Evening Standard that made my blood freeze, then boil again.

First I see the headline, deep into the paper on page 22: Sound of silence: coffee shop where Paul Simon, Dylan and Hendrix sang up for sale.

It's immediately clear they're talking about The Troubadour, the coffee shop on the Old Brompton Road in Earls Court which has the most famous basement in London. It is, literally, the place where much of the music, folk, folk-rock, psychedelic - which defined the 60s and 70s was helped out into the world, before it flourished.

I was too young to know the place in its heyday but went there in the 70s, more or less as tourist, even though at the time I was living five minute's walk away in Beaufort Street. I was in complete awe of the place and of its regular clientele, who all seemed impossibly cool and wonderful to me, the suburban oik who'd fallen lucky and was mixing with a group of older people who'd been involved in their scene from the outset.

So now, 40 years on, it's up for sale: the vendors, who've kept the flame burning as brightly as they could for the past 17 years, say it is no longer viable. It's not just the £150,000 pa rent - more disgraceful  than that, even, is the fact that Kensington & Chelsea council has approved a 9pm noise abatement order on the garden area.

Now, checking out the Troubadour's twitter and Facebook feeds, it seems they're trying to calm our fears: they say their hoping new owners will given them the funding to continue offering a full program of live music. But to me it's this 9pm curfew thing that just seems outrageous - this is Earls Court, not Stoke Poges!

Current owner Simon Thornhill told the Standard that it was the latter that had "killed" them: "Before, people wanted to live in a vibrant area with a lot going on, now it's like they want to live in a dormitory zone".

Exactly: but why are these people allowed to have any sway in the argument? It was bad enough when they tried this one on the Ministry of Sound at the Elephant and Castle. That nightclub had been a massive success for about 20 years when developers decided they'd like to build luxury apartments next door. Luckily, the club was owned by a guy who had some clout in the establishment and the threat was removed.

You'd think, therefore , that the Troubadour would have twice the moral and cultural capital with which to snub such a ludicrous idea, that they have to hush down after  9 o'clock, for god's sake! And yet the council went with the money.

What happened to the rights of the existing population?

I read this story while listening to a debate on the future of BBC licence fee funding. It made me think: I would pay double the current licence fee happily for what I get from BBC Radios 4, London, 3, 2, 1, and 6 in that order (I like BBC TV as well, or a lot of it, but unfortunately my TV aerial is not really up to the digital signal which seems very flaky).

Anyway, double the licence fee and give the BBC a new remit - to rescue culturally significant performance spaces like the Troubadour, and similar clubs all around the UK, and use them for recording live performances. Remember when the BBC used to own half of Shepherd's Bush? Let's go back to that, with theatres, cinemas, recording studios, etc, back in public ownership. WHat a dream!

But whatever happens, don't , please, turn the Troubadour into a Costa.

Oh, look - Nine Elms disease at last reported by Evening Standard

I was wondering when London's main media outlets would start to look harder at the miracle of redevelopment that is happening very fast along the southern bank of the river Thames, between Vauxhall Bridge and Chelsea Bridge.

Of course it was all Olympic excitement when the plans were announced, way back in 2012 - a new life for the old iconic Power Station, vibrant new communities where in the past all we had had were council estates, markets and cats-and-dogs homes.

And a rather grim recycling centre, and an awful lot of gravel/infill/chippings/cement or whatever it is that Hanson et al pour into the back of those high-velocity cement mixer trucks that go up and down Queenstown Road at all hours of the day, spraying it with cyclist-toxic pebbledash.

Now, thanks to the Evening Standard's op-ed heavyweight Simon Jenkins, we can be sure that this indeed is part of the big problem.

In today's (25.03.14) issue Jenkins waxes very shirty about the empty-property problem that is now bedevilling his own manor - Kensington & Chelsea, of course. Then he fires a salvo aimed at the massed forces of those who are juicing this city dry with their  rapid-build, off-the-plan schemes:

"The south bank of the Thames is becoming Europe's version of Dubai's Palm Island, the winnings of an evil world stashed in Boris's behemoths littering the London skyline".

He adds that  the rich developers will continue to choose nice old houses in Knightsbridge and Kensington for themselves - and that their weird high-rise investments in Bermondsey and Blackfriars and Vauxhall  are likey to remain empty, an "insult to London".

Well, I can't help but sympathise. Chiefly, I must admit, because those new high rises along the Nine Elms strip are going to totally obliterate what had once been a rather charming, back-end of view of Westminster.

A pox on you all, whoreson pimps, you fat-pursed invaders of Vauxhall. A curse on you, all of you!