When Paul came down the communal stairs at his block of flats in Soho, central London, he was faced with the sight of a young man outside urinating against the glass front door. The man was too drunk to notice Paul standing there, so Paul had to wait in the lobby until the man had finished. Living in an area surrounded by pubs and bars means dealing with public urination – and worse – is something he has grown used to. “It becomes normalised,” he says. “But that doesn’t mean it’s right.” His family are from Soho, and he says a lot of visitors aren’t aware there is a community who live there. When people realise and are apologetic, he doesn’t mind so much – it feels thoughtless, rather than disrespectful. It’s far worse, he says, when “you get people who are just belligerent or rude”.
Public toileting – or “wild toileting” as it has been called, like an antisocial version of wild swimming – has been a growing concern, particularly since Covid closed public loos, many never to reopen. That comes on top of a longer-term decline in public facilities – Raymond Martin, managing director of the British Toilet Association, estimates we have lost 50% of public toilets in the past 10 years. Meanwhile, cash-strapped councils’ street-cleaning budgets have been under pressure, as costs of cleaning, particularly during the pandemic, have risen. And according to a report by the Association for Public Service Excellence, public satisfaction at cleaning is at its lowest in five years.
Martin had a meeting last year, he says, with the London assembly, part of the Greater London Authority, to try to get more public loos built or reopened. “Street urination “is everywhere now”, he says, “because toilets were closed, so people were being forced to go wherever they needed to go – alleyways, street corners, whatever. Now you’ve got this smell, and staining on the streets. That’s just urination, never mind the defecation side of things. It’s a major problem.”
In recent years, many politicians have called for a renewed focus on public toilets, with limited success. This year, Labour London assembly members rejected an amendment tabled by the Green party that proposed spending £20m on new toilets at underground stations.
Perhaps we grew more accustomed to “wild toileting” during the pandemic – sales of Shewees, for instance, the device that allows women to stand while peeing, and therefore pee where men pee, have boomed 700% since the first lockdown – and it has taken us a while to return to normal standards. It has always been a problem when large numbers of people descend on a place, such as the visitors to Cheltenham races last month.
“For 51 weeks of the year in Cheltenham, no one would urinate against a wall in public at 10.30 in the morning,” says Max Wilkinson, a Cheltenham borough councillor. “During race week, it seems to be something that happens, and local people shouldn’t be expected to turn a blind eye to it or accept it. It’s totally disgusting, and it shows a lack of respect for our town.” Residents complain of men urinating in their front gardens, and businesses report streams of urine in doorways and down walls. “It is a very small minority who do this, but the impact on the local area is quite profound,” says Wilkinson.
This year, Wilkinson declared, as he calls it, the War on Wee. Public urination has always happened in the town during the races, but, he says, “it’s become more noticeable in recent years and that’s despite the fact that more temporary loos have been put in”.
One measure the council tried this year was hydrophobic (water-repellent) paint on walls, “so when people go for a wee in what they think is a quiet spot, or up against a wall somewhere in the town centre, they will get a bit of splashback on to their trousers and shoes. We did a social media campaign, and there were posters all around town letting people know that it’s not acceptable.”
Wilkinson says no fines were handed out in 2022, even though there were numerous complaints from residents, and photographs posted on social media of men urinating on streets and in parks.
He has witnessed it himself. “I saw a group of blokes walking past the postal sorting office, which isn’t a long way from the town centre. There were cars in stationary traffic less than 20 yards away, they took one look at each other and decided to go for a wee against the wall. This was in the morning. It’s disgusting and it’s got to stop.”
Police said they were “cautiously optimistic” that antisocial behaviour had reduced in Cheltenham this year, including complaints about public urination.
In Soho, in central London, residents have reported people peeing through their letterboxes, says Tim Lord, chair of the Soho Society. On one of the worst-affected streets, residents of one block reported that “in the summer in particular, people were urinating all along, into the doorways of those flats on the ground floor. Their kids saw men’s genitals, it was appalling. The whole of Soho in the summer smells of urine, and has done for three or four years.” Business rates of £200m are raised in the area, he says, much of that is from pubs and bars. “If you’ve got an area which is incredibly economically productive, some of the money that generates should be spent to mitigate the problems it’s likely to cause – it always used to be and now isn’t. That seems to be fundamentally wrong.”
Lord has lived in the area for more than 30 years. “For many years, we had two quite large underground public toilets,” he says. He lived near one of them. “It always used to be open from 10am till 2am, and was quite well run, quite clean. About 10 or 15 years ago, I noticed that they weren’t looking after it, and it was closing earlier. I thought, that doesn’t make sense. Soho has a lot of alcohol licences, about 400 in a quarter of a square mile.” Good public toilets, he says, are “really an important part of Soho’s ability to function”. It’s not just the drinkers – many of whom will be tourists bringing money to the area – using them, but market traders and homeless people. “It’s another humiliation for the homeless people that there’s nowhere they can go.”
Both public toilets closed during the pandemic and didn’t reopen, though there are plans to refurbish one of them. “We now have very ugly temporary toilets, which cost £15,000 every weekend from Thursday,” says Lord. The council have also introduced hydrophobic paint along with posters pleading with people not to urinate on the street. “There is an acknowledgement that there’s a problem,” says Lord, “but then they’re still closing one of the large underground public toilets. There appears to be no medium to long-term sensible plan.”
The temporary toilets have decreased the level of public toileting, he says, but “they’re pretty ugly. We ask the council, is that the plan for ever? And there’s no answer to that question.” Lord is sceptical about what he describes as the “pee paint” – would drunk people notice, or care, about their urine being splashed back on to them, he wonders.
Other towns and cities have tried different measures. Public open-air GreenPee urinals that double as planters have been installed in Amsterdam, and in Belgian cities. In the GreenPee urinal-cum-planter, urine is absorbed by hemp – a single urinal can cope with up to 300 toilet visits. It is taken away for composting and can later be used to fertilise public parks. Paris, home of the pissoir, now has the Uritrottoir; an eco urinal installed in areas of high public urination, which also harvests urine for compost. Lyon has considered women, and trialled composting sit-down urinals; not only did they save water, compared with flushing toilets, but the deputy mayor said that in the trial of 16 units, 35,000 litres of urine had been collected to use as fertiliser in less than three months. And last year, officials in Boston in the US decided to trial sensors in lifts on the transport system that would alert cleaning crews to the presence of urine.
In England and Wales, the law is technically on the side of the War on Wee. You could be fined under the Public Order Act if you are caught urinating in public (or even punished for indecent exposure, under the Sexual Offences Act of 2003, should you be found guilty of exposing your genitals and intending to cause alarm or distress). In Scotland, where public urination comes under the Civic Government Act, police recorded 1,222 urination offences in 2021.
But unless a police officer happens to be passing, the vast majority of public urination instances are not reported. Max Wilkinson points out that he reviews social media for complaints from local residents, “because that’s now a popular way for people to report it”. Social media users have even shared video doorbell footage of people urinating in front gardens in a bid to publicly shame individuals. Some have complained to parcel or food delivery companies that their employees have been caught urinating on their property, though this is more likely because of a lack of proper breaks and access to facilities, rather than disrespect or lax hygiene.
Apart from being unpleasant, wild toileting comes with more serious implications. As Wilkinson says, witnessing someone relieving themselves in public can feel “threatening to a lot of women, and to men too”. Urine can erode buildings, and create pollution. While the ecological impact of public toileting in towns and cities remains understudied, it’s reasonable to believe it may have a detrimental effect on nearby waterways. Dr Christian Dunn, senior lecturer in natural sciences at Bangor University, led a study to measure the presence of drugs in the nearby river during and after Glastonbury festival, and found cocaine levels high enough to potentially harm wildlife downstream – contamination caused by public toileting.
“The problem with chemicals in urine entering our rivers is that they help create a cocktail of drugs in our waters – and we have very little knowledge of what the effects of this ever-changing mix are on aquatic wildlife, ecosystems and, ultimately, our own health,” Dunn says. “We can research the effects of one particular chemical, such as cocaine, on one species, like eels, but the situation in our rivers is much more complex – there are many chemicals and compounds reacting with entire ecosystems, with short- and potentially long-term effects.”
Wetlands, he says, can help mitigate these risks. Existing between rivers and land, they act as “ecological kidneys”, says Dunn, and could help filter out harmful chemicals, but these “have been decimated over the centuries as we’ve strived to use every bit of land in the UK for building or farming. We should be looking to re-establish these wetlands along all our rivers – in the countryside and even our cities.”
And then there are hygiene issues. The pandemic reminded us of the importance of cleanliness, says Martin of the British Toilet Association, but we are not creating the infrastructure to support it. “We’ve got to get our hygiene levels back up to not only where they were, but way beyond that. That means things like flushing toilets, rather than urinating in the street, and people being able to wash their hands.”
Epidemics fuelled the rise of public toilets in the first place, says Lee Jackson, historian and author of Dirty Old London: The Victorian Fight Against Filth. “The Victorians were the first people to try to deal with public urination. They did that off the back of the cholera epidemics of 1832 and 1848, where anything that seemed insanitary had the worry that it brought contagious disease,” he says.
Measures such as “commit no nuisance” signs, built-in deflectors on temptingly discreet walls of buildings and cast-iron urinals – many incredibly ornate – started to appear on streets (few of the urinals survive in London, but Jackson says Birmingham is a good place to spot them).
“Public toilets for women didn’t really come in until the late 1880s,” says Jackson. Conveniences were “part of that late Victorian thing of municipal socialism – public libraries, baths, and toilets – this idea that we have these things built for regular people,” he says. Sadly, and maddeningly for anyone caught short, that lovely idea now feels as quaint and fanciful as an ornate urinal.
