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.
