The smells of London's lockdowns, part one: Toilets, toilets everywhere - but never a place to pee...

It's surely one of the most stinging ironies of these lockdown months. While the number of available public conveniences has reduced drastically as a result of austerity and Covid-19, there are actually many more toilets horribly visible to anyone who walks the streets of this or any other gentrified or gentrifying inner-London suburb.

Apart from the loos in the larger supermarkets, which are often as not out of order, I can only think of one public toilet in this postcode that is reliably open during the hours of daylight. 

Remember those first hot weeks of the first lockdown when parks - and especially Clapham Common - began to reek, not just of the normal dog-shit but of something more acrid? Beer and prosecco-tinged urine. It got to the point where the council had to provide portaloos.

But padlocked, private versions of these same, sentry-box sized erections were already popping up all around us. 

Thanks to the phenomenon noted in much of the media, the bored super-rich all seemed to get the same idea - use their lockdown time and loose change to effect complete gutting and refurbs of their metropolitan properties. 

So you suddenly see lots of those blue or yellow plastic boxes outside every house that is having its innards replaced by something even more expensive.

Yes, I'm referring to those portaloos for builders that are now overflowing  (hope not literally) onto the residential pavements of South, North, East and West London. What's happened? In the past builders and decorators were quite happy to use the owner's loo when it was needed. And owners always used to let them do so, as well as offering them cups of tea and coffee, assuming there was a functioning kitchen.

But now, the entire family moves out to one of its other properties - maybe in the Cotswolds, or maybe somewhere more exotic.  So the builders have the place to themselves. Except, it seems, for the bathrooms. Perhaps the owners cannot bear the idea of not-quite-so-rich people using their gold-plated sanitary facilities. 

I can't help feeling slightly uneasy as I pass one of these private conveniences, which are sometimes only inches from a narrow pavement.  Or even on it. 

I side step, as if trying to observe social distancing: in doing so I often forget to look down and end up treading in the latest dog-do, miniature or massive. (Why do lockdown dog owners not seem to know about bagging the dirt? Another article there - but, no, don't worry,  that's one thing I can't face writing about.)

In theory the builder-bogs are emptied at least twice a week. I know this becuase I have watched the waste removal tankers pulling up across the road, to that house which has been undergoing god knows what improvements and additions for more than a year now. 

Even if you don't see this operation, you hear it as the powerful suction pumps blast into action. It's almost as noisily annoying as the dreaded leaf-blowers, which continue to shatter everyone's peace every Monday morning.

So, this is lockdown, Clapham style. Around five of the 120 or so houses in this streeet have had new super-basements excavated during the last year. There's hardly been a days when there have not been teams of workers arriving at 8am, followed soon after by the first deliveries of cement, sand, timber, steel, paving, glass, grass, porphyry washbasins and marble baths, Aga cookers, elizabethan bedsteads, Hollywood size tvs. You name it.

So, it's clear that London's wealthiest homeowners can assume they are exempt from all lockdown restrictions when it comes to building work. And are those builders also exempt? Have you ever seen a builder wearing a mask on site? Maybe they have the same immunity as professional footballers on the pitch.

I will stop moaning here and now, for a day or two. It was good to get that off my chest. I envy those workers the easy access to a toilet at work, as well as the many cigarettes they get through on the porches and open upper windows of thier clients' fourth of fifth homes. This is good: as I say in almost every posting, these days, at least these guys and (not so often) women have some paid work during lockdown. 

Thank you and good night. 

Back on the track of London's disappearing public loos

The way of all London's bogs? This once splendid cottage-style public
 convenience on the north side of Clapham Common is up for grabs.
It will become either a ridiculously expensive nosherie or some
 bonused-up banker's stinky pied a terre. Whither our free
piddling places, I ask?

Time Out's Alexi Duggins uses his page this week to bemoan the decline of London's public toilets - reminding me of a blog post I started to write two years ago and never published.

As one who has (as if cursed to do so) toiled around the inner zones of London for most of the past four decades, I have an internal, instinctual map telling me when and where I have to alter my itinerary in order to find a place to pee.

This has become all the more important as age and the ripening prostate gland push up against the weakening bladder.

So I started a sort of widdler's guide to free peeing in zones 1 and 2. I will begin again, but with some very good news right from the heart of things - from Soho, London W1. In fact, the centre of Soho - the public toilets in Broadwick Street, near where it crosses Berwick St - are open again, and still free!

When they closed a year or two back I feared that they would never re-open and become yet another trendy place for a piss-up instead of a piss. If they did re-open I imagined they'd be the new fangled type with a turnstile and a charge of at least 50p, like all the now horrible toilets in all of London's railway termini.

 How lovely, then, to find these classic Soho toilets (well, the  gents at least - even for the sake of this survey I did not risk descending into the ladies) completely unchanged. Except that they seem to have removed the great slabs of sheet steel bolted between the stalls that were presumably meant to discourage cottagers taking peeks at their neighbours' bits.

Moving on towards Oxford Circus, there was another free underground loo, entered from the Regent Street traffic island on the north side of the junction. Is it still there?

If not, I would make for another good old fallback position - the toilets in John Lewis, easily accessible from the staircases on the Square side.

Moving south, I used to make frequent use of the gents in the subway of Piccadilly Circus tube, the exit that used to lead directly into the basement of the now defunct Tower Records flagship store. Such a useful convenience, this one was, allowing you to empty everything before prolonged browsing through the racks.

Now, I think, it has also gone. The door is still there but always locked.

On to Trafalgar and Leicester Squares - you pay through the nose in both for the horrible WCs. Instead, I make for the crypt of St Martin in the Fields, a great place for a cheapish lunch and a free pee, as well as brass rubbing and regular photography exhibitions.

It always makes me feel a bit guilty, entering museums and churches and shops and so on, just to relive myself - but it can't be helped. If only I had more nerve I would do what so many London flaneurs always did, and stride confidently into the poshest hotels to use the luxury facilities, precious fragrances and fluffy towels and knee-scraping flunkies and all! But I know I would be shooed away before I even penetrated those plate glass rotating doors.

With the sad changeover of the Covent Garden piazza toilets to pay-as-you-piss, I find that whole area now a bit of a piddler's desert. You can go to the British Museum, of course, or all the way up to Russell Square gardens where there's still a free loo beside the cafe. Likewise, I think, in Lincoln's Inn Fields….again, that is tbc.

Move a bit north, and there was marvellous old style public loo just by Coram's Field, but I fear that has now closed, just  like the magnificent old loos with glass cisterns by Chancery Lane tube station.  There are plenty of free loos in the Barbican complex, but getting out of there is always a gamble. Old Street tube station's subways are blessed with two fine things - a cut-price bookshop (Camden Books) and an old fashioned free London Transport bog.

I am pleased to report there's still a good subterranean  toilet in what remains of  Old Spitalfields market, over in the corner by the cashpoint.

The Brick Lane, Shoreditch and Hoxton area - use the pubs is all I can say. I'm sure these super-trendy areas have splendid community crapperies, but I have yet to experience any of them.

Angel is hopeless - I looked for a pisser in Chapel Market but it had gone. The Angel Bar - a reliably busy Wetherspoon's boozer - is a good place, and you can get a pint for the price of a piddle in some of London's more upmarket institutions.

Islington Green has one of those awful igloo things. Highbury corner, which looks so promising, seems to have nothing. I could've sworn the Overground station had a toilet once, but no such luck now. I've been known to leg it all the way down Roseberry Avenue to Sadler's Wells theatre to use their nice free toilets down the stairs.

Now we're out in zone 2, which is fast becoming a public convenience desert. Camden, Kentish Town, Maida Vale, Paddington, Notting Hill - where, oh where, are the toilets of yesteryear? Dalston,  you cry? Hackney? The town hall in MAre Street, I remember, had good loos. There must surely be a grisly market toilet in Ridley Road. Need to check out out. And something very organic on London Fields, one hopes.

Moving very swiftly south of the river, if you're caught short in Brixton head for Pope's Road behind the market, and there's a fine free Lambeth loo waiting for you there.

Excellent free loos in glorious festival of Britain style abound in lovely Battersea Park - yes, amazingly,  Wandsworth Borough Council must have forgotten about these very egalitarian poo-ing places.

By contrast, Clapham, once so well provided for, indeed famously a cottager's delight - now has very little. The bogs by Clapham Common tube are now a bar (WC, ho-ho!), and the one by the old Library (now an expensive arty place, the Omnibus) is closed and up for sale or rent. If stuck, head for Sainsburys in the High Street or the new library. But beware - the library's unisex loo is very well equipped for disabled people, so do not pull the cord thinking it will flush the loo - it sets off a very loud alarm.

Further south - give up. Either piss on one of the commons, or dive into one of the many pubs heaving with drunken yuppies.

And of course this crazy runaround has left many gaps, and missed out many hidden treasures of the world of public sanitation. If you can fill them, please do so. But do remember to adjust your clothing before you leave. Thankyou.