Coram's Fields, WC1N

It is testament to the versatility of the public toilet that something originally intended simply as a place for members of the public to relieve themselves has long since outgrown its original purpose and can be used today by anyone from a junkie wanting to shoot up his latest fix to somebody just looking for a convenient place to dispose of an unwanted baby, but the way that public toilets have been adapted to multiple uses is something that has often been attributed to Thomas Coram, who established a Foundling Hospital on what is now Coram’s Fields.

  Realizing that many mothers were understandably reluctant to deposit their unwanted children in the hospital itself, Coram had some public conveniences built in nearby Guilford Place, knowing that its location was sufficiently far away from the hospital that mothers could abandon their children without being noticed but close enough that the infants could be collected before any harm could come to them, and the original design of the toilet included a hatch and chute into which the newborns could be safely deposited. The hospital left its original site in 1926 but the toilets were kept open for several more decades as a memorial to their visionary founder.

Marble Arch, W1

Originally featured in Time Out London, 14-20 May 2009

Many tourists get hopelessly lost trying to find the toilets at Marble Arch due to the labyrinth of underpasses that surrounds the station, but few know of the reason for this apparently illogical design. For when Speakers’ Corner was created in 1872 some MPs were concerned about the effect free speech would have on a volatile public so agreed to it as long as they were allowed to design the nearby conveniences, for reasons that became apparent shortly after they opened, during a speech by Karl Marx.

    Midway through his oratory, Marx went off to use the lavatory but struggled to find it and after walking around for a while soon became horribly lost and disorientated, at one point entering the ladies’ toilet by mistake and being chased out by an irate old woman who took him to be a pervert. By the time he had found the gents’ and returned to his podium, almost half an hour had passed and his audience had grown bored and wandered off, which was exactly what the MPs had intended when they designed the facility. Historians have subsequently cited this as one of the major examples of political ideologies failing to take off as a result of cunning toilet design.

Leyden Street, E1

No Jack the Ripper walk is complete without a visit to this toilet, which is forever linked to the legend of London’s best loved serial killer due to an incident that took place in 1888 when Annie Chapman, a keen amateur prostitute, was approached by a mysterious stranger who then pulled out a knife and attempted to stab her. Chapman managed to get away, and ran into the conveniences in the hope of hiding, only to make a fatal mistake: crouching in one of the cubicles she noticed that the toilet had not been flushed so pulled the chain out of habit. The silence of the East London night was immediately broken and the Ripper, alerted to her whereabouts, ran down into the facility in hot pursuit; whilst Chapman evaded him once more he eventually caught and brutally murdered her on nearby Hanbury Street.

     Decades later, however, Ripperologists used the incident in an attempt to prove the briefly fashionable theory that the Ripper was in fact Queen Victoria, arguing that she had taken to prowling the streets and committing murders in an attempt to rid London of undesirables. Their ‘proof’ was that Victorian morality would have prevented a man from entering a ladies’ toilet, so the killer must have been female, but critics pointed out that a deranged and maniacal murderer would have paid scant attention to such a piece of social etiquette, and the theory was swiftly discredited.