When Did Going to the Loo Become Private?
Imagine walking into a public toilet.
You choose a cubicle, close the door and, quite possibly, check that you've actually locked it.
For most of us, going to the loo is one of the most private things we do. Even in a public bathroom, we create a little temporary room around ourselves. There are doors, partitions and locks, and a collection of unwritten rules designed to allow everyone to politely pretend that nobody else is doing exactly the same thing on the other side of the wall.
But people haven't always gone to the loo in quite the same way.
Travel back through history and our ideas about toilets and, more importantly, privacy, begin to look rather different.
So when exactly did having a wee become something we wanted to do behind a locked door?
The answer is surprisingly complicated.
The Romans: fancy a chat on the loo?
If you visited a public latrine in the Roman world, you might encounter something rather alarming to modern eyes.
A row of toilet seats.
Next to one another.
With no cubicles between them.
At Housesteads Roman Fort on Hadrian's Wall, for example, the remains of one of the best-preserved Roman latrines in Britain can still be seen today. At its height, the fort housed around 800 soldiers, and its communal toilet block had no individual cubicles: men sat side by side.
There was, apparently, plenty of opportunity for a bit of gossip while they were there.
But we need to be a little careful before concluding that Romans simply didn't care about privacy.
Archaeological evidence shows that Roman sanitation was much more varied than the famous communal latrines might suggest. Public and private toilets existed, and their size, location and design differed considerably.
Archaeologist Ann Olga Koloski-Ostrow's major study of sanitation in Roman Italy uses toilets, sewers, archaeological evidence, graffiti and literature to investigate Roman hygiene and social customs, including attitudes towards privacy.
So we shouldn't imagine every Roman happily chatting away on the loo.
What the archaeology does show is that bodily functions could take place in communal settings that would feel distinctly uncomfortable to many of us today.
Our modern toilet cubicle was certainly not inevitable.
Medieval loos weren't quite as simple as we imagine either
Move forward into the Middle Ages and things become even more interesting.
Castles and substantial houses could contain garderobes, toilet spaces often incorporated into the building itself, with waste falling through a chute into a pit or outside the walls.
Some could be remarkably private.
At Dover Castle, Henry II had his own garderobe adjoining his principal bedchamber, essentially a twelfth-century en-suite.
But mediaeval toileting could also be very communal.
Monasteries often had large shared latrine blocks known as reredorters or necessaria.
Historic England describes how water leaving a monastic complex could be channelled beneath the reredorter drain, helping to carry waste away.
And then there is a particularly wonderful survival in the collection of the London Museum.
A mediaeval wooden toilet seat discovered at Ludgate Hill has three holes.
Three members of the same household could, quite literally, have used it side by side.
Suddenly the modern, locked cubicle begins to look rather luxurious.
Privacy begins to move behind a door
So when did going to the loo actually become private?
There wasn't a single moment when everybody suddenly decided to shut the door.
Instead, the surviving buildings suggest something much more gradual, and much less tidy.
Historic England notes that wealthy inhabitants of castles and great houses could have individual lavatories adjoining their private chambers from early in the Middle Ages. By the later Middle Ages, such private facilities appear to have become increasingly commonplace among wealthy households.
Yet private and communal arrangements continued to exist alongside one another.
The same Historic England study describes public latrines in larger medieval towns and communal toilet blocks in monasteries.
And even royal households weren't entirely devoted to solitary toileting.
At Hampton Court Palace, the Great House of Easement, built in 1534, was a two-storey communal latrine capable of seating up to 14 people on each floor.
Twenty-six people.
One loo.
In London, communal arrangements persisted too. London Museum records that in 1579 the 85 residents of All Hallows, near the Tower of London, had just three private toilets between them.
So the history isn't really a straight line from “people weren't embarrassed” to “people became embarrassed.”
Privacy depended upon who you were, where you lived, how much space and money you had, and what sort of building you happened to be having a wee in.
But gradually we can see something familiar emerging.
The toilet could increasingly become a little space of its own.
The loo was beginning to acquire a door.
Enter the flushing toilet
There is a tempting story about toilet history that goes something like this:
People used holes for centuries. Then somebody invented the flushing toilet. Everyone became clean and modern. The end.
Unfortunately, history is rarely that tidy.
An early version of the flushing water closet was designed by Sir John Harington, godson of Elizabeth I, in the 1590s. He described his invention in 1596.
It was ingenious.
It also didn't transform Britain overnight.
The design required large quantities of water and, crucially, existed in a world without the extensive sewerage infrastructure that would later make flushing toilets practical on a large scale.
The Science Museum notes that it would be more than two centuries before a new generation of water closets became commercially available.
The flushing toilet, in other words, wasn't a single revolutionary invention.
It needed an entire system around it.
The Victorians change the loo
The nineteenth century was a major turning point.
Britain's rapidly expanding towns and cities faced enormous sanitation problems. Waste accumulated in cesspits, streets and waterways, while diseases such as cholera repeatedly devastated urban communities.
London's sewage problem became particularly notorious.
By the summer of 1858, the Thames had become so polluted that the smell became known as the Great Stink. The stench was particularly unbearable around the Houses of Parliament and helped galvanise political support for a new sewer system.
Meanwhile, flushing toilets were becoming increasingly visible and increasingly desirable.
At the Great Exhibition of 1851, sanitary engineer George Jennings installed public flushing toilets for visitors.
More than 800,000 people paid one penny to use them.
That penny bought rather more than a wee: the charge also included use of a towel, comb and even a shoe-shine.
And from those Victorian public conveniences came one of Britain's favourite euphemisms for going to the loo:
“Spending a penny.”
A very grand Victorian loo
For a rather lovely example of what the toilet had become by the end of the nineteenth century, we can leave London altogether and travel north to Manchester.
On Deansgate stands the extraordinary John Rylands Library.
Commissioned by Enriqueta Rylands in memory of her husband, the library was designed by architect Basil Champneys and constructed between 1890 and 1899. The Grade I listed building resembles a Gothic church more than our modern idea of a library.
But tucked away beneath all that soaring stonework, stained glass and scholarship is something rather more relevant to our story.
The loos.
The library retains some of Manchester's last original Victorian lavatories.
And they are wonderful.
During the major restoration of the building in the early 2000s, the University of Manchester reported that the Victorian toilets still retained their original flushing mechanisms in working order.
The ladies' toilets contain an especially delightful detail.
The University actually encourages visitors to look out for the “bustle space” on the seats, additional room incorporated behind the seat to accommodate the voluminous fashions worn by women at the end of the nineteenth century.
Even the loo, it seems, had to make allowances for Victorian fashion.
But the Rylands lavatories tell us something more important too.
Compare them with Housesteads.
A Roman soldier could sit shoulder-to-shoulder with his companions in a communal latrine.
By the end of the nineteenth century, an important public building could provide purpose-built lavatories divided by sex and designed around the privacy and comfort of the individual user.
The toilet hadn't merely acquired plumbing.
It had become architecture.
And extraordinarily, more than a century later, visitors to the John Rylands Library can still go downstairs and see that history for themselves.
It even has room for your bustle.
But the private flushing loo was still a luxury
It would be very easy to leave the John Rylands Library and assume that by 1900
Britain had arrived at the modern toilet.
It hadn't.
The magnificent facilities in an important public building tell only one side of the story.
The Science Museum notes that flushing toilets remained an inaccessible luxury for huge parts of the population well into the twentieth century.
For poorer households, outside privies and shared facilities remained a normal part of life.
So once again, privacy wasn't simply a matter of changing attitudes.
It was also about money, housing and access to infrastructure.
Having a toilet of your own was a privilege before it became an expectation.
The smallest room becomes a very private room
Something fascinating had happened along the way.
The toilet had moved.
Physically, it increasingly became incorporated into the home.
But socially, it became increasingly separated from the rest of domestic life.
Walls.
Closed doors.
Eventually the modern bathroom allowed bodily functions to happen almost completely out of sight.
And our language became rather good at hiding them too.
We “go to the bathroom.”
We “use the facilities.”
We “powder our nose.”
We “spend a penny.”
We “pop to the loo.”
Anything, sometimes, except announcing precisely what our body is about to do.
And that's where things get interesting
Privacy itself isn't a bad thing.
Most of us are probably quite grateful that the Roman communal latrine hasn't made a comeback.
But there's an important distinction between privacy and embarrassment.
The history is too complicated to say that private toilets caused embarrassment about bodily functions.
But today, the very things we carefully conceal behind a locked bathroom door can also be things we find surprisingly difficult to talk about.
And that can matter.
Because the same words we avoid at the dinner table are sometimes words we need in a doctor's surgery.
We need to be able to say:
It hurts when I wee.
There's blood in my urine.
I'm suddenly going much more often.
I can't empty my bladder properly.
I'm leaking urine.
Something has changed.
Those conversations shouldn't be embarrassing.
They're information about our bodies.
Perhaps we can keep the cubicle...
...but lose some of the embarrassment.
Two thousand years of toilet history tells us something rather wonderful: there has never been just one way of going to the loo.
Romans used communal and private latrines.
Mediaeval monks shared enormous toilet blocks while kings could have private garderobes beside their bedchambers.
Early modern Londoners might share multi-seat toilets.
Victorian engineers transformed sanitation while hundreds of thousands of people paid a penny to experience the new public flushing loos.
And at the John Rylands Library, the Victorians even made sure there was room for a bustle.
Nobody at Oui is proposing a return to sitting shoulder-to-shoulder with a group of Roman soldiers on a communal latrine.
Some historical developments are probably best left firmly in the past.
But perhaps we can borrow just a tiny bit of their apparent matter-of-factness.
Because having a wee can be private.
Talking about wee doesn't have to be.
Oui. Let's talk about wee.
Sources
Roman toilets
Ann Olga Koloski-Ostrow, The Archaeology of Sanitation in Roman Italy: Toilets, Sewers, and Water Systems, University of North Carolina Press, 2015.
Mediaeval and early modern toilets
Flushing toilets and Victorian sanitation
The John Rylands Library
Suggested reading
If you'd like to delve a little deeper into the history behind this article:
Ann Olga Koloski-Ostrow, The Archaeology of Sanitation in Roman Italy: Toilets, Sewers, and Water Systems (2015). A fascinating archaeological study of Roman toilets, sewers, hygiene and attitudes towards privacy.
Historic England, Utilities: Introductions to Heritage Assets. A particularly useful illustrated introduction to the development of water supply, drainage and sanitation in historic English buildings.
Science Museum, Flushed Away: Sewers Through History. An accessible history of cesspits, sewers, Sir John Harington's water closet and the transformation of sanitation during the nineteenth century.
London Museum, Early modern London's sewage problems. A wonderfully vivid look at toilets, cesspits and waste in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century London.
English Heritage, Top 10 Toilets Through Time. A lighter introduction to 2,000 years of British toilet history, from Housesteads Roman Fort to the development of the modern loo.
The National Archives, Innovations in Toilet Design. Particularly interesting on George Jennings, Victorian public conveniences and the origins of “spending a penny”.
This article explores the history of toilets and privacy primarily in Britain and Western Europe. Attitudes towards sanitation, privacy and bodily functions have varied enormously between cultures, places and periods.
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