Islington, N1

Whilst Islington today lacks any historic public conveniences there was a time in the 1980s when it looked as if a new facility would be built and named after one of the borough’s most famous residents, the playwright Joe Orton. Islington Council in the 1980s was notoriously left wing and keen to appeal to minority groups so when the twentieth anniversary of the playwright’s death arrived in 1987 a group within the council suggested a new set of public conveniences be built to honour Orton, who by that time, due to a recent biopic, had become almost as famous for committing gay sex acts in toilets as he was for his groundbreaking plays. Along with naming the toilet after him, the council also planned to build a bronze statue of Orton, which was to be placed at the far end of the urinals and depict him performing a lewd act whilst cheekily winking at anyone using the facility. However, the idea faced opposition from Thatcher’s government and the right wing press partly because Orton had been imprisoned in the early 1960s for defacing books from two of the borough’s libraries, and in the face of strong objection the idea was dropped.

Great Portland Street, NW1

This toilet’s proximity to two BBC studios has led to it being irrevocably linked to the TV series Doctor Who, as the programme’s creators originally intended the Tardis to be a toilet cubicle that the Doctor could use to teleport to any public convenience in the universe. However, BBC bosses decided that the opening sequence of a dandyish gentleman looking furtively over his shoulder before entering this public lavatory was not in keeping with the corporation’s image, so the Tardis was changed to the now-iconic police box.

The convenience did, however, feature in a 1970s episode of the show in which Tom Baker runs into it to escape from Davros, the despotic leader of the Daleks; Davros unwisely follows him, only to tumble down the stairs and fall out of his Dalek exterior. Seizing the moment, the Doctor grabs his helpless nemesis and holds his head in a toilet whilst repeatedly pulling the chain. After a few minutes of this Davros reluctantly agrees to cancel his planned invasion of earth and retreats in humiliation, but it was as a result of this that Davros redesigned the Daleks so they could negotiate staircases, something later cited by fans as a key moment in the show’s history.

Hampstead Heath, NW3

The Gothic appearance and gloomy atmosphere of this convenience on Hampstead Heath have long made it a favourite of celebrities ranging from George Michael to Dracula, and it features in Bram Stoker’s novel when Van Helsing visits the facility but is attacked by the Count in one of the cubicles, only managing to escape after he temporarily stuns him by constructing a crucifix out of old toilet rolls.

A similar method of ambush had been used by Dick Turpin the previous century as, prior to employing a horse-based method of robbery, he used to pounce on his victims as they sat helplessly on the toilet, inventing the cry ‘stand and deliver’ to sarcastically refer to his victim being unable to stand up due to being in the middle of expelling a stool. Turpin made use of the toilet once more some years later when he hid in there whilst escaping from some men who were trying to arrest him, claiming that, due to an ancient bylaw, wanted criminals could claim sanctuary in public toilet cubicles in the same way they could in churches. The lawmen unwisely left him to check the statute books and when they returned after finding that no such law existed, Turpin had long since escaped.

Clissold Park, N16

Stoke Newington has long been known as a bohemian area and its famous former residents have included Edgar Allan Poe and Daniel Defoe. What is lesser known, however, is the role that the public toilets in Clissold Park played in inspiring Defoe’s classic novel Robinson Crusoe.

Defoe spent much of his life in debt and after realising that he could no longer work at home without being disturbed by the bailiffs he had the idea of taking a week’s supply of food and writing materials and locking himself in one of the toilet’s cubicles in order to get some peace and quiet. This ploy worked far better than he could have imagined as after a few days he began to wonder about the effects of long term isolation and started writing a tale in which a man is accidentally locked inside a toilet just before it closes down for good and then has to survive there on his own for several months. However, shortly before publication Defoe realised that he could appeal to a public hungry for tales of foreign adventure by changing the location from a dank public convenience to a tropical island paradise and having undertaken a hasty rewrite a literary classic was born.