LAVATORIES¹

Joseph Bramah

The water closet is supposed to have been invented in 1596 by Sir John Harington. The beneficiary of this expression of ingenuity was his godmother Queen Elizabeth I, for whom he constructed one in (the now disappeared) Richmond Palace in Surrey. Because few houses had supplies of running water and those that did had highly irregular water pressure, the W.C. remained essentially a curiosity. In addition, there was no drainage system to accommodate their general adoption.

Joseph Bramah (d.1814) was born near Barnsley in Yorkshire. He trained as a carpenter. After arriving in London, he worked as a cabinetmaker. He became involved in fitting water closets. He noticed the shortcomings of the existing models. In 1778 he patented his own ballcock-regulated cistern, an improved version of Alexander Cunningham's S-trap water-closet, which had made lavatories much less smelly.¹ He started manufacturing them in Denmark Street. The device was introduced into a number of the city's great townhouses. The bowls for Bramah's water closets were manufactured by Josiah Wedgwood. Like numerous other consumable items, it was soon copied by those lower down the social order. The city's large middle-classes were a market that could make a manufacturer wealthy. So not only were more W.C.s made but better ones were designed by manufacturers in the hopes of securing a competitive advantage over their rivals.

Bramah s interests covered other engineering problems. He was interested in both basic product design and the technology to be able to mass produce the artefacts that he envisaged. He developed a cordial professional relationship with the architect William Wilkins. Among the items that he furnished for the man's buildings were lavatories, skylights, and treadmills.²

Location: Denmark Street, WC2H 8LS (blue, yellow)

Website: www.bramah.co.uk

¹. In 1775 the watchmaker Alexander Cumming F.R.S. took out the first British patent for a water-closet.

². In 2007 it was reported that Ken Shuttleworth's Make practice was designing the Grosvenor Waterside development's Bramah building. The edifice was going to be erected on the site of what had been the Bramah Works.

Commercial Exploitations

For many people the dry disposal of human waste involved it being excreted into a pail and then covered in ash.

In the 1840s guano started to be imported from Peru. This had the effect of undermining the nightsoil industry.

The German chemist Justus von Liebig (1803-1873) was a strong believer in the potential for human waste to be converted into material that could benefit mankind. Marx abhorred the discharge of sewage into the River Thames. He believed that von Liebig was correct.

In the 1860s the agricultural scientists Joseph Gilbert and John Lawes examined the issue of using sewage as fertiliser. The pair concluded both that the number of crops that could actually benefit was limited and that it could be but that the sites where it was used had to be in close physical proximity to the materials source. As a result of these conclusions, the enthusiasm for the commercial exploitation of sewage declined.

The Rev Henry Moule devised a dry earth closet. He was given to quoting Deut. 23:13.

Convenience Combustibility

On 8 March 1685 the royal warship H.M.S. London left Chatham Docks and sailed up the River Thames. While doing so, she exploded. The sound was heard across London. 300 people were killed in the incident.

In 2008 the theory was mooted that the ship's crew had taken to relieving themselves in the vessel's deepest recesses. The faeces had rotted there and released methane that had accumulated within the craft's structure. Someone had probably unwittingly taken a lit candle or lantern too close to the gas, which had ignited. The resulting fireball had probably caused the vessel's stock of gunpowder to detonate.¹

¹. One of the key ingredients of gunpowder was saltpetre. The potassium nitrate that this contained was usually extracted from pig slurry.

Thomas Crapper & Company

In 1848 Thomas Crapper, a native of Thorne in Yorkshire, was apprenticed to a Chelsea plumber. By 1861 he had set himself up as a sanitary engineer and had premises in Marlborough Road. With the construction of London's main sewers, the demand for water-closets surged. The Metropolis Water Act of 1872 required the water companies to operate under a single set of regulations. One of the intentions behind the measure was to try to reduce the amount of waste water that was being discharged into the system. In 1853 Joseph Adamson had patented the siphonic flush system. Crapper developed an economical variation that was capable of being mass produced.

To reduce waste water, the Metropolis Water Act of 1871 imposed a two-gallon flush limit on London. In response to this development Thomas Crapper, a plumber, designed the Waste Water Preventer to regulate how much water was left in a cistern.

In the 1880s he was hired to install sanitary fittings at Sandringham, the Norfolk country house of the Prince of Wales (King Edward VII). This led to the first of four royal warrants that the Crapper business was awarded. Crapper came to be a word for a lavatory.¹

Location: 120 The King's Road, SW3 4TR (red, grey)

Website: https://thomas-crapper.com

¹. The words crap as a noun and crap as a verb have different, if uncertain, origins.

An Entitled Commode

Lady Mary Wortley Montagu and Alexander Pope were neighbours in Twickenham. She was interested in poetry and the two became close friends. He may well have fallen in love with her. The two had a complete and bitter falling out. The cause of this is not known but may have stemmed from his expressing ardour for her. She commissioned a commode that was decorated with imagery of books. These bore his name on their spines.

The Hackney Empire

In 2004 The Hackney Empire (1899) reopened after having undergone a major restoration. The cartoonist Ralph Steadman paid for a new urinal to be put in. He dedicated the item of sanitary ware to the memory of the Dadaist artist Marcel Duchamp.

Location: 291 Mare Street, Hackney, E8 1EJ

Website: www.hackneyempire.co.uk

Lavatory Paper

In 1880 purposefully-manufactured lavatory paper went on sale. It was in the form of individual sheets that were packaged in a box.

See Also: TOWNHOUSES The Spicer House

Andrex

Roonie Kent was inspired by a disposable paper handkerchief to create a crepe lavatory paper in 1936. In 1945 his firm, then based in St Andrews Road, Walthamstow, started manufacturing a brand of toilet tissue called Androll. In 1954 the company's name was changed to Andrex. Three years later it introduced pink lavatory paper. This development led to bathroom colour co-ordination. In 1972 Andrex launched its first Puppy television advertisement. It was the first lavatory paper to be advertised through the medium.

Website: www.andrex.co.uk

Poetic Criticism

In 1733 the 4^th Earl of Chesterfield had a water closet in the first floor of his house on Grosvenor Square. He advised his son that poetry books should be used for lavatory paper.

Location: 45 Grosvenor Square, W1K 2HR (purple, turquoise)

John Neville Maskelyne

The penny lavatory was invented by the magician John Neville Maskelyne, who was an engineer as well as a magician.

Model Dwellings

One of the exhibits at the Great Exhibition of 1851 was the Model Cottage which had been designed by the architect Henry Roberts. This had been commissioned by the Society for Improving The Condition of The Labouring Poor. It had been paid for by Prince Albert, who was the organisation's president. One of the features of each dwelling was that it had a room that had a water closet. These were flushed with rainfall that was stored in a roof cistern.

In late 1871 the Prince of Wales succumbed to typhus. For two month's he was close to death. However, ultimately, he survived. Following his recovery, he declared that had he not been a prince then he would have wished to have to been a plumber.

Location: Model Cottage, Kennington Park Road, c.SE11 4BE

The Monkey Closets

The Metropolitan Commissioners of Sewers had been very slow to build any public lavatories. There was a concern that they would prove to be a financial liability. Therefore, the Royal Society of Arts, which was organising the Great Exhibition, used the event as an opportunity to demonstrate how public lavatories could be a public amenity, that the public would want and be prepared to pay to use them. The organisation commissioned Josiah George Jennings to design some. His monkey closets were simplified water closets. They were used by 827,280 people during the exhibition, generating 3447.

Location: The Old Football Pitches, Hyde Park, W2 2UH (orange, purple)

Necessary Houses

In the early 18^thC lavatories were known as necessary houses.

Public Lavatories

Albion Street

The former public lavatories in Albion Street in Rotherhithe had bilingual notices. This was because the district used to have large numbers of Scandinavian seamen pass through it.

Location: Albion Street, SE16 7LN

Automated Public Convenience

London s first automated public convenience (A.P.C.) was installed in Leicester Square in 1983.

Location: Leicester Square, WC2H 7NG (purple, orange)

Holborn

The public conveniences that the Victorians built sometimes sought to be temples to cleanliness. As such, they were equipped with ornate furnishings. The ones in Holborn are reputed to have had glass cisterns so that users of the facility could appreciate the transparency of the water. An attendant was said to have taken to stocking these tanks with goldfish.

See Also: ANIMALS Aquaria

PoMo Po

The structure containing Westbourne Grove public lavatories and flower kiosk (1993) was designed by Piers Gough's CZWG architectural practice. It is a restrained example of the Post-Modern style in a way in which Ian Pollard's Marco Polo House (1987) in Battersea and GMW's Minister Court (1991) (a.k.a. Monster Court) in the City are not.

Location: 222 Westbourne Grove, W11 2RH (purple, turquoise)

Website: https://czwg.com

The Royal Exchange

London s first public flush lavatories were installed at The Royal Exchange in 1855. However, these were only for men. Women did not receive their own ones in the building for another 56 years.

Location: The Royal Exchange, EC3V 3LR (purple, blue)

Website: www.theroyalexchange.co.uk

Tidal Flush

The early 15^thC mercer and Lord Mayor Richard Whittington paid for a public lavatory in St Martin Ventry (Bell Wharf Lane). It was flushed by the Thames's tide.

Location: Bell Wharf Lane, EC4R 3TB (purple, yellow)

The Tower of London

Latrines were built into the structure of the walls of the Tower of London's White Tower.

Location: The Tower of London, EC3N 4AB (purple, orange)

Website: www.hrp.org.uk/tower-of-london

David Backhouse 2024

LAVATORIES1