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