The first thing Raymond Martin looks for in a toilet, he says, is cleanliness. Does the tissue paper on the floor mean this public lavatory has failed his inspection? “You have to understand that it’s a working toilet, it’s now mid-afternoon – a few bits of tissue on the floor is neither here nor there,” Martin says. “If there were cigarette packets, bottles on the floor – that I’d be worried about.” We’re in Knutsford, Cheshire, and Martin is on a toilet-inspection tour of the north and west of the UK. He’s just come from the Lake District and Blackpool. When we part ways in a couple of hours, he’ll head on to Wales to inspect the public conveniences of Pembrokeshire.
Do people laugh when Martin, who is managing director of the British Toilet Association (BTA), tells them he does toilet inspections? They do, he says. “But then, immediately, they say, ‘I’ll tell you where I was and they had wonderful toilets …’.”
