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In a dark, damp underground chamber in south London, a council employee is trying to elucidate why a century-old public toilet could possibly be the perfect setting for a flower shop. Torchlight darts across rusty taps and porcelain caked in dirt. Water drips down the partitions and paint peels from the ceiling. On a table, an old rotary phone has been left off the hook as if abandoned mid-call. Even though it is a gentle day outside, down here it’s freezing.
But what looks just like the set of a horror film is an area that Lambeth council hopes can change into a brand new hotspot. Abandoned because the Eighties, these facilities in Brixton’s Windrush Square are actually available on the market for development. Suggested uses include “retail, café, restaurant, bar, gallery” and “shared workspace”.
Shopping, drinking or taking your laptop right down to a windowless room that was a public lavatory may not sound appealing but Lambeth isn’t the primary council to have this concept. Across London, the variety of bars, restaurants and low shops housed in disused toilets has reached double digits. As a substitute of being coy about their origins, many developers are selecting to make it a feature.
At Attendant, a “speciality coffee and brunch café” situated in an old Victorian loo in Fitzrovia, customers sit on bar stools at the unique urinals, eating their avocado toast under a big white cistern.
Across the Thames, the Bermondsey Arts Club is a former WC turned speakeasy-themed cocktail bar. Look beyond the black piano and art deco fittings and the porcelain-white wall tiles hint at its past. One bartender admits that he finds it difficult to forget what the venue was. That’s, he says, “until about 11pm when 100 or so people are available in”.
Andy Bell, who opened WC, a pair of wine and charcuterie bars situated in an old Edwardian bathroom in Clapham and a Grade II Victorian toilet in Bloomsbury, says that he and his partner desired to preserve the history of the sites. “Our whole idea was attempting to use as much of the present design and architecture as possible without putting people off drinking and eating.”
For a few of London’s indebted local councils, repurposing public conveniences as bars, brunch spots and other industrial uses brings in much-needed income and restores life to old buildings.
However the developments also highlight a decline in town’s public services. Based on a report published by Age UK this yr, London has lost almost 100 public toilets up to now decade. In February, the British Toilet Association launched a campaign calling for a legal obligation to be placed on councils to supply more public lavatories.
Some councils have tried to get around the issue of dwindling public facilities via community toilet schemes — restaurants, bars and shops providing, sometimes for a fee, clean, secure and accessible toilets for the general public in addition to their customers.
Still, Londoners may feel that a rest room within the corner of a café is not any substitute for the Victorian splendour of those mothballed WCs — especially when other global cities are constructing inviting recent facilities.
In Japan, for instance, the Tokyo Toilet Project brought together architects and designers to rebuild 17 unique public lavatories within the Shibuya area between 2020 and 2023. The outcomes, celebrated within the Oscar-nominated film Perfect Days by Wim Wenders, include outdoor, high-tech cubicles made out of colored glass partitions that turn opaque when the door is locked.
One other design, a cedar-clad restroom of individual huts linked by walkways, was created to mix in with the park where it was built. The project is meant to be a logo of Japanese hospitality.
Back in London, such lavish facilities are rare outside industrial developments. Recent public services are thin on the bottom and never known for his or her grandeur. Some charge customers and operate inside limited hours.
At Brixton’s disused subterranean toilets, no less than one person seems to think the space needs to be returned to its original purpose. Not long after a rental notice went up, the graffitied insertion of an ‘i’ turned the location’s “To Let” sign into “Toilet”.
ben.parr@ft.com
