… e-petitions

Did you know there’s a ‘Public Toilets Suitable For All‘ e-petition on the Government’s official website? I’ve put a link on the right if you wish to sign.

It calls for a change to the law so that local authorities are legally required to provide public toilets.

(at the moment they ‘can’ provide them, but they don’t have to).

For a long time I’d gone off this idea. The argument against this (that I’ve heard, at least) is that local authorities are more responsive to local demands than national government interference and being forced to provide something can be seen within local government as a bureaucratic burden, or a distraction, from the real work of providing services.

Translation: What’s the point?

Then I went to a seminar by the Women’s Design Service about public toilets and saw how much frustration (or anger even) there still was that public toilets are being closed all over the country with nothing suitable being provided instead. I’m not normally one to link to the Daily Mail, but this article by an Incontinence Specialist summarised the need for public toilets from a health & well-being perspective wonderfully.

There are good reasons why some older public toilet blocks are closed down, and sometimes there is better provision to be found in ‘privately’ provided facilities (shopping centres, for example). However that shouldn’t absolve the local government from responsibility for the service. The role of local government would be to ensure that this provision exists (through planning requirements for example) and that it is, as the petition says, ‘suitable for all’.

To be honest I still don’t know what other effects a legal requirement would have on local councils (other than a sense that it would be.. annoying). From an outsider’s perspective, when councils make cuts they will inevitably have to start with a voluntary provision (a ‘nice-to-have’!) before anything else. What I don’t know is whether there would be a better budget for toilets in the first place if they were a statutory requirement. How does that work? Would councils get more money from central government to help cover it? Or would they just have to cut something else?

The e-petition itself is a peculiar business. It was created by a group of toilet enthusiasts / researchers / experts who are now trying to promote it (voluntarily, and with no money) to get more signatures.

In theory, any petition with 100000 signatures is debated in parliament. Consequently it feels more like a marketing competition than a reflection of public opinion, as before you find 100000 people who agree with you, you first have to reach 100000 people. We’re not succeeding here. Does it matter?

The good news is that our petition currently has the second highest number of signatures of all the petitions to the Department of Communities and Local Government, so in that regard it should get on someone’s radar.

To be honest I feel that the real prize of a petition is an increased awareness of an issue and a recognition of public support, rather than a magic number. So far 3000 people have signed it. That’s 3000 people that we don’t know that agree with us. Wow!

Petitions may be an ‘easy’ form of participation; it doesn’t show any great sense of commitment from those 3000 to the cause, but then ‘easy participation’ is not a bad thing! Nor should anyone be flippant about the strength of someone’s support just because they’ve ‘only’ signed a petition.

Have you ever signed a petition that you didn’t believe in?

Here’s a not-very-pretty graph of signature numbers, so far.

… ?

… ?

I’m out of ideas with this public toilet open data.

It’s been fun, but we’ve got no money and I’m feeling pretty despondent that we’ll find funding.

It’s not cheap doing research (though not expensive either? It’s all relative..) – we’d need somewhere in the tens-of-thousands for our research centre to do another year’s work (including development) – the idea being that with another year we could develop it to a point where it was tempting for someone else to take on, ‘sustainable’ even. However the general opinion seems to be that it’s a great idea but someone else should be paying for it. 

In August 2010 I wrote to my local MP to huff and puff about the previous Government’s lack of response to a 2007-08 Communities and Local Government Select Committee into public toilets.

She asked the Department of Communities and Local Government to respond to my concerns, and Parliamentrary Under Secretary of State Andrew Stunell MP replied. His reply can be read here. It was not encouraging.

So, as something of a last resort (although I’m now not sure why I haven’t done this before? Cynicism, at a guess..) I’ve replied to Mr Stunell to let him know what we’ve been up to since then and that there’s a ‘Good Idea’ up for grabs if he fancies it.

——————————–

Dear Mr Stunell,

In Autumn 2010 you replied by mail to my letter about public toilets (via my local MP Jane Ellison).

I would like to let you know about the work that we have been doing since receiving your reply, developing public toilet open data and ‘The Great British Public Toilet Map’ (http://greatbritishpublictoiletmap.rca.ac.uk). I would also like to ask for your assistance.

For over 2 years I have been working in inclusive design research into improving public toilets, funded by the UK research councils, at the Royal College of Art Helen Hamlyn Centre for Design.

In your letter you said that:

“It is right that local people should be able to hold local authorities to account over decisions taken on their behalf. Transparency is the foundation of accountability and we are challenging local authorities to give easy access to a wide range of data including service information.”

For over a year I have been helping councils to improve both their public toilet provision and transparency by publishing open data about their toilet locations, opening hours and accessibility, in line with the Government’s commitment to open data and all the benefits to innovation that it brings.

“I understand that a considerable amount of public information about public toilets is already publicly available via local authority and other privately provided websites.”

I’m afraid that this is not accurate nor solving the problem of finding a public toilet when away from home.

With regard to local authority websites, too much information is out-of-date, inconsistent or absent. This was confirmed in the 2011 London Assembly investigation into London’s toilets.

With regard to privately-provided websites, these provide a snap-shot of toilets at the time that the database was created. It’s not possible for a single moderator to monitor and update data on thousands of toilets across the UK – there are (only) 800 in London alone. Those that try crowd-sourcing the data leave themselves open to erroneous entries and incomplete information.

By encouraging councils to publish public toilet open data, the information can be collated into a single source and displayed on sites like our own work-in-progress pilot website ‘The Great British Public Toilet Map’ (which I mention merely an example, rather than a solution) rather than fragmented across 406 local authority websites (where it exists).

Websites and apps can display the most up-to-date data provided by each council. This puts the power over the quality of the information into the hands of each council. It also stimulates business by giving the privately-provided websites and apps the seed data to make their service work, to which they can add value through innovation.

I would like to ask the Government to investigate the creation of a web service that helps local councils (and transport bodies, service stations and other providers of publicly-accessible toilets) to provide this data, collates the information and outputs it under an Open Licence for developers to use.

I believe in localism and would not wish to suggest councils should be forced to do this. The benefits lie in providing an interface that assists a council officer to create the data, in collating that data on a national level, and in attracting the wider open data community to develop services that both inform the public and promote the provision of public toilets. This seems to me to be a good fit with current Coalition policy.

I can offer you a prior example from the Australian Government who achieved exactly this by gathering information from 1000 councils and organisations about 15000 public toilets (http://www.toiletmap.gov.au)

I can also offer my experiences. Since late 2010 I have:

• contacted around 100 councils explaining the need for open data about public toilets
• increased the number of councils publishing public toilet open data from one to 30+, despite considerable barriers due to Ordnance Survey licencing and local council understanding of open data.
• assisted the London Assembly in their investigation into London’s public toilets and development of an open data standard for public toilets, the first of its kind (http://www.london.gov.uk/publication/public-toilets-london)
• tested and demonstrated the potential for public toilet open data through the website ‘The Great British Public Toilet Map’ for a pilot area of the London boroughs

I have also presented this work at:

• the 2011 TSO Open.Up competition, where the judges created a special runner-up place for the project because of its social benefits
• DCLG’s own ‘Really Useful’ event organised to develop projects that made good use of local open data
• The Royal College of Art Helen Hamlyn Centre for Design Symposium 2011, attended by Ed Vaisey MP

Our work on public toilet open data has been consistently praised within local government and DCLG circles as “A Good Idea”, and we would be happy to (and have been encouraged to) continue working on it, but we simply do not have the funding, nor could we take responsibility for the legacy of project – we are a research centre, not a central hub of public data.

However I believe far too much in the importance of this project to let it die.

Local councils are not in a position to spend money building public toilets, but as a society we are in a position to provide better information about those that we have. This is essential to improve the quality of life for the estimated 3 million british people with continence problems (http://www.patient.co.uk/health/Urinary-Incontinence.htm), who’s freedoms are restricted by their lack of information of and access to public toilets.

This would be a public service to meet an urgent public need.

Please let me know if you would like to know more about this work. I would be happy to discuss it further.

Yours sincerely,

Gail

Gail Ramster (Knight)

Research Associate

Helen Hamlyn Centre for Design

Royal College of Art

Kensington Gore

London SW7 2EU

email: gail.ramster@network.rca.ac.uk

web: www.hhc.ac.uk

blog: gailknight.wordpress.com

… UK GovCamp 2012

(This post has sod-all to do with toilets, but this is where I blog, so..)

I went to UK GovCamp 2012. It was last Friday. People have been posting their Top 20 things that they took from the experience. This seems like a good exercise to make sense of it all. I’ll do 10, cause I ramble.

A bit about what UK Gov Camp is..

UKGovCamp 2012 is an event organised by enthusiastic people. It’s loosely described as being an (un)conference for people working in Government and IT.

I don’t work in either. 

I’ve also seen it described as ‘Public Sector and Technology’, which I prefer as ‘public sector service design’ we touch on through our people-centred design work at the Helen Hamlyn Centre for Design. ‘Tech’ rather than IT also feels more open, as this covers community forums and online networks and the way that the internet can aid communication and help communities become more inclusive. ‘IT’ sounds like a conference exclusively for web managers and people who program. 

It’s an un-conference because there’s no agenda or speakers or abstract submission or registration fee. At the start of the day, people (anyone who wants to, which ends up being about a third of the attendees) announce something they’d like to talk about, which is then assigned to a time and a room. In these rooms, people interested talk about things. 

1. Go, even if you don’t know what it is. 

I went this year because I went last year.

I went last year because my twitter feed (lots of local government people and open data enthusiasts, because of my public toilet mapping) were getting REALLY excited about it. There were only 3 tickets left, so after frantically running round the internet going ‘but what the crap IS IT?’ I signed up feeling like a bit of a fraud.

It turned out to be useful, but even if it hadn’t, it wouldn’t have mattered – there are 200 people, so no one will notice you if you don’t want them too.

2.  If you think someone should be at ukgovcamp – invite them.

Sending general tweets (“hey people interested in this! – come to this!”) is good, but it’s an advert, not an invite. “I’m interested in that, but do they really mean me? Or do they really mean them? Yes, they mean them, because they know them and they work together. They don’t mean me. It’d be weird if I went.”

Writing exactly the same tweet but with an @mention at the front is an invite, and makes a world of difference. It also means that that person will know at least one other person, which eases any worries about who you’re gonna eat lunch with.

Some people are not on twitter. But they’re probably on email.

Some people would like more elected representatives. If someone isn’t there, did they know about it? And did they know why you think they should be there? Did anyone invite them?

3.Don’t worry about who you’re going to eat lunch with.

Yes a lot of people know each other, but a lot also turn up alone. Hunt them out and sit down beside them. If conversation falters, pretend to go to the loo.

5. Introductions are vital

At the start of the conference, everyone stands up and says who the are and where they’re from. With 200 people this takes a long time, yet this may be the most useful part of the day for me. If I listen hard to the names I can recognise lots from my twitter. I also picked out a couple of randoms that I thought ‘ooh! They’re here! It’d be nice to hear what they think.” (someone from Lambeth council, someone from Engine). I never did; everyone quickly looks the same, but thanks to the attendee list on Eventbrite at least I can look them up and follow them on Twitter.

It’d also be useful to do introductions in the sessions.

The most useful thing I got from last year’s GovCamp was meeting Janet Hughes from the GLA and getting more involved in their investigation and recommendations for London’s public toilets. That wouldn’t have happened if the open data session I was in hadn’t had us all introduce ourselves.

There are always more people in a session than there is time or opportunities for people to speak. I’ve no idea who half the people in any session are or why they’re there (and vice-versa).

Some sessions are too big for this, and some are small enough not to need it, but it would have been nice if it had happened once.

6. Get a seat at the table. 

Literally.

Each session I went to was already quite full and I was sat on the carpet. This reduces the likelihood of my saying anything (or even listening) by about 200%. The one time I was sat at a table – because I forgot that Room 1 was the auditorium, not the one labelled ‘Room 1′ – I had a nice chat with Glen Ocsko who had made the same mistake.

7. A nice chat is better than a session

I don’t think I take much from the sessions at all. I get inspired by conversations that I’m involved in, but I’m crap at saying anything in a session that involves more than, say, 2 people. Dane Wright formerly of Brent Council came over to talk to me in a break about his views of the GLA’s open data standard for public toilets and this was a far more useful 3-minute conversation than any of the sessions that I listened to (I recognised him from the session last year where everyone introduced themselves..).

It’s also just nice to meet people that you know ‘off of the internet’, to acknowledge that you do. I don’t think you have to meet people off the internet to make an online connection more valid, however my constant worry is that just because I read and enjoy every post someone ever makes, do they know I exist? Even if they follow me, or once @mention-ed me, do they remember me? Which are the real links and which are in my head?

So it was nice to meet / talk to @glenocsko, @tom_chance, @puntofisso, @iamadonut. I enjoy your tweets.

It was also nice to say hello to people I’ve met before, and meet new ones – the people I sat next to at lunch, the man next to me in the auditorium, the guy I talked to on the way in, and the lady from teacamp who talked to me in the ladies. Thanks.

And @welovelocalgov, whoever you are.

8. It doesn’t matter if you don’t go

It was a nice day. I learnt stuff and listened to some interesting conversations, particularly about neighbourhood democracy and participation, something that we’re about to start a project on. I now know of a few more people who work in the same field, who’s blogs I can follow and hopefully talk to and swap notes at a later date.

If I hadn’t gone to ukgovcamp, I’d probably have found them anyway, not least from reading the posts about ukgovcamp. I go to ukgovcamp because I like it, not because I need to. This is another difference between unconferences and conferences.

However…

9. I’d pay for ukgovcamp.

I wondered whether free events could ask people to pay afterwards however much they think it was worth. I went to an Open Data Masterclass, another free thing that I signed up for on Eventbrite to find out what it was, and it was incredibly useful, more so than most conferences with a £200 registration fee.

Unconferences need to stay free – how do you know if something is of value to you until you’ve been? – but that doesn’t mean they don’t have a value in hindsight.

I imagine, compared to the amount raised from sponsorship, that my £30 wouldn’t go far, but it’s the thought that counts.

10. Don’t make comments about UK GovCamp unless you’re prepared to do something yourself.

Dave Briggs and Steph Gray organise UK GovCamp for.. fun? perhaps? I don’t know, but without them it wouldn’t happen. So commenting about an event, whether neutral or negative, without being prepared to do something yourself seems pathetically ungrateful compared to the effort that they and others put in to create it.

So if I get frustrated that there aren’t more designers at ukgovcamp, then I should 2. Invite them.

If I wish people would 5. do introductions in sessions then I should suggest it in the session.

And if I wish that people who are struggling to make data useful or improve public services or communicate with their neighbourhoods would talk more about design and the people they’re designing for, then I should 6. Get a seat at the table and talk about people-centred design and how passionate I am about it.

I guess that’s what I’ve taken from UKGovCamp.

• Invite people to things they might like
• Introduce myself to those I’d like to know

and

• find practical ways to bridge the gap between design and the public sector.

… the High Street

‘Thanks’ to a tweet by @Feria_Urbanism, I spent too much of Tuesday night watching BBC Parliament, where MPs where debating ‘The Future of the High Street’. There were at least 4 people watching and tweeting, not bad considering the number of MPs taking part (thirty?).

High Streets, communities and urban design interest me, although I’m ‘self-educated’ in the latter, by which I mean that I’ve read Jane Jacobs and get pissed off at pedestrian crossings.

The MPs were referencing The Portas Review, Mary Portas’ report into the future of our high streets.

Mid-speech, one MP (I think it was the opposition minister for local government and communities) seemed to be listing the features and infrastructure that are essential to our town centres and I flippantly asked my fellow tweeters if The Portas Review mentioned public toilets.

I doesn’t. Having now flicked through the report, it is instead about Business Rates, Planning Policy and Other Things that I don’t understand so must be important. As it should. It’s very good.

I was only holding out  for a passing reference, along with ‘bins’ and ‘flower baskets’. Public toilets always seem trivial, and yet no one can deny that they’re part of the urban infrastructure. Are bus shelters trivial?

“The out-of-town shopping centre is sterile and not a great experience, but if you have a kid it is easier and makes you suddenly go less into town”

33-year-old man with his 1-year-old daughter.

There was a lot of talk about free parking during the MPs’ debate. This was something that out-of-town retail parks and shopping centres could offer over their high street rivals. However the quote above isn’t from the high street review; it’s from our research, which is how I know that he wasn’t just talking about parking, although I’m sure that was a factor.  He was talking about toilets. This father, and others, have stopped visiting the high street in part because of toilets.

I could go on.

I could mention ’100 ways to Improve the High Street’, a collaboration between the National Skills Academy for Retail, the Association of Town Centre Management, Local Government Improvement and Development and the Institute of Place Management, which, aside from a passing reference in #42, Reversing Decline of Existing Markets (“This includes toilet facilities, credit card payment systems and refrigeration for fresh produce…”) failed to find room out of 100 for public toilets or community toilet schemes, despite describing itself as ‘a collection of schemes’.

I emailed the contact person to express my surprise. Their reply left me more depressed. Is this a reason to omit something?

“Public toilets could possibly appear in a number of sections in this guide as their use may change depending on whether we are talking about changing room facilities for those with young children to the night-time economy.”

The Portas Review mentions local markets.  It also recommends that Town Teams should focus on making high streets accessible, attractive and safe. To explain this, it mentions ‘our ageing population [who] will need the same great access to high streets that they have to out-of-town centres, by car as well as by bus and other methods of public transport.’

I went to a seminar about attracting older people to out-of-town retail parks. They stressed the importance of public transport, parking and level access, but ‘somewhere to sit’, ‘somewhere to have a cup of tea’, and toilets should be high up the list too. As is so often the case with public toilets, that’s common sense talking as much as it is ‘expert research’.

Back in the 90s, whenever my family went to the retail park, we’d always end up at the store that had the café and the loo, regardless of whichever store it was that we’d gone to visit.

This must have had an impact on the footfall into that store; isn’t getting people through the door half the battle? 4 years of weekends visiting my granny with my parents means that I’ve visited every garden centre from Shrewsbury to Birmingham; garden centres being the perfect outing for anyone looking for 1-2 hours of gentle amusement that include:

• fresh air
• cup of tea
• level access
• toilet

Some of them wouldn’t survive if it wasn’t for those of us in search of a hot drink and a piece of cake.

Our high streets need to become destinations. Mary Portas’ vision is that they are places ‘where we go to engage with other people in our comunities, where shopping is just one small part of a rich mix of activities’.

Well, at the risk of being flippant, out-of-town or town centre, I couldn’t last more than an hour anywhere that didn’t have a loo, and I’m perfectly healthy (I think).

We live in a convenience culture, but out-of-town shopping centres don’t just offer convenience; they offer a public convenience. The high street should too.

… Analysing London

Using information from council websites, I made some maps to show the varying numbers and types of toilet across London, from public toilets and community toilet schemes to other publicly accessible toilets (in Stations etc..). That was yesterday’s blog post.

It revealed as much about the levels of information on council websites as much as it did about the number of toilets. With that in mind, I’m going to milk the data a little more, to see what else it can reveal.

Population

I downloaded a pretty cool dataset called ‘London Borough Profiles’ from the GLA’s London Datastore (though I only ended up using the population data)

Firstly, here’s a map of population by borough.

(Link to actual map)

I’m quite surprised. I knew Wandsworth (where I live) has 300 000 residents, but I didn’t know that this was nearly twice as many as neighbouring Hammersmith & Fulham.

Clearly Wandsworth should have more toilets than Hammersmith & Fulham..

..but how many toilets is enough? 

Map of Number of Residents per Public Toilet

(Same Link to actual map as before – once in Geocommons you have to check boxes on the right to display different maps)

Hmm. Bit patchy.

The Audit Commission stopped counting public toilets in the UK in 2000. I used their data from 200 last year to make thestatement ‘[In the UK] 1 public toilet serves over 13 000 members of the public’  (UK Population / Number of toilets). If we use that dodgy statistic as a baseline average, any borough on the map that is blue (20 000+ residents/toilet) or dark blue (40 000+ residents/toilet) needs to find itself some more loos.

‘Blue’ Councils: Harrow, Haringey, Redbridge, Havering, Newham, Croydon, Hammersmith & Fulham. 

‘Dark Blue’ Councils: Islington.

However that’s only half the story. Firstly, people don’t need public toilets when they’re at home, so residents/toilet is slightly flawed, particularly in London where council areas are small and people spend a lot of the day in a different borough altogether.

The City of London is an extreme example – one public toilet for every 139 residents! Is that even enough? No one lives in the City of London, but bucket-loads visit each day.

A better measure is footfall. Provide a public toilet that suits the number of people in the vicinity that need it. This applies to town centres, parks, transport hubs – all should have a public toilet (partly because people expect to find a public toilet there), but footfall can decide how big it should be. British Standard 6465 has calculations to help authorities determine this.

Community Toilet Schemes

Yesterday I complained that Community Toilet Schemes are being used to replace public toilets rather than as a supplement to provision.

An extreme case is Richmond, who have 97 community toilets, but no public toilets (although they used to). I have some sympathy. The public toilets that they (and Wandsworth) closed were either underused or misused.

However to rely entirely on Community Toilets is to put a lot of pressure and responsibility into the hands of local business, with less control over accessibility, and no back up plan if businesses find visitor numbers excessive or can’t deal with groups.

Anyways, back to the data.

I first counted the number of public toilets in London based on council websites in Spring 2011. This means I have 2 sets of data, with over 6 months in-between.

This table shows the change in numbers of public toilets (including those in parks when listed), and the change in publicly-accessible toilets (including community toilets).

+/- Number of Toilets in London between Spring and December 2011* (based on council websites)

*Disclaimer: Table doesn’t show 13 councils where no change was noted. Don’t read too much into a +1 or -1 count either. I may have miscounted. I miscount a lot.

Remarks:

• The first column has more red. Conclusion: Public Toilets are closing.
• The second column has more green. Conclusion: Community Toilet Schemes are growing. 
• Barking & Dagenham have ‘lost’ 22 toilets because they seem to have deleted their public toilet webpage.
• Kensington & Chelsea‘s website have gained 10 public toilets. This is partly because they didn’t used to list the 8 public toilets in parks.
• Bromley and Lambeth have both opened community toilets whilst closing public toilets. 

also,

• Wandsworth and City of London have expanded their Community Toilet Scheme a lot this year.
• Not sure what’s going on in Kingston.

An Inconclusive Conclusion

The data from council webpages tells stories, but some of those stories are about the data itself (‘webpage deleted’) rather than the subject of the data (‘public toilet closed’).

Sometimes the data hides the story.

Michelle commented on my blog post yesterday with the following:

You cannot believe all you read on websites – the last time I looked at Croydon’s website for toilets, they listed some that had been closed for years.

Also, data is sometimes too vague to be useful – Lloyd Park in Croydon is shown as having public toilets, but this park covers dozens of acres, and there is no clue as to where these toilets may be. I have visited for 12 years,and have never found them!

What use is a public toilet webpage if it lists toilets that have been closed for years? 

Is the ‘open data’ that I’d rather the councils produced any more accurate than website info?

8 of the 33 boroughs in London provide open data about their public toilets. This data is displayed in The Great British Public Toilet Map (London).

Table showing Council Website Data vs Open Data

Ugh.

Remarks:

• Not one of these councils shows the same number of toilets in both columns. That’s not good.
• Camden include some station toilets (that they don’t manage) on their webpage, but not in their open data. That’s par for the course.
• Hackney have redeemed themselves! (no webpage).
• Hillingdon‘s open data only covers the libraries (and one Superloo in a library car park).
• Lambeth and Sutton‘s open data is only for their Community Toilet Scheme.

Camden, Wandsworth and Lambeth (I think) produce open data by pulling it directly from an existing council database or file, so should be up-to-date, (so long as someone occasionally hits ‘refresh’). I doubt any of the websites pull data in that way – all look ‘hand-written’.

Otherwise, there’s no real way of knowing which is more up-to-date, or more *right*.

So What Next?

The point of this exercise was purely to map something using ‘Geocommons’ which I first saw at an Open Data Masterclass a year ago.  It took a day to make my first map (well.. a year and a day), but now that I have, I’m tempted to get more reliable data.

That would require asking councils via a Freedom of Information request for ‘number and type of public toilets ‘ ‘council expenditure of public toilets’ etc.

I might.

To be honest, I wasn’t trying to campaign or make a point, I was just playing with maps.

One thing that I think I’ve shown is that using borough-level stats to determine a decent public toilet provision quickly becomes meaningless.

Public toilet numbers, types and locations are better determined locally, by local people and visitors, as a service designed in a people-centred way, not determined centrally or arbitrarily from above.

Although.. comparing councils is kinda fun.

… Council Websites (London)

I’ve made a graphical map of public toilets in London by using the information given on council websites.

This is a screenshot, because I can't embed for toffee.

You can view the actual map (it’s ‘clickable!’) here. It has labels to show which council is which. You can also Download the Data (.xls)

It says as much about council websites as it does about toilets.

For example, the 4 ‘white’ areas show councils with ‘No Toilets’. That’s because they don’t have a public toilet webpage. They may have squillions of toilets, but like the proverbial tree in the forest – if a public toilet isn’t listed on the council website, does it really exist?

That’s a bit rich coming from me, who has previously said that a council website is the last place anyone would think to look when in need of a toilet. The problem is that, until we have a database of public toilet locations and a UK public toilet map, it’s also the only place where this information exists.

If we ignore those 4 councils on the naughty step (Barnet, Barking & Dagenham, Hackney & Hounslow), there is still a huge range in the number of public toilets, from 4 (Islington. Seriously?! FOUR??) to 99 (the unlikely Wandsworth).

That’s because Wandsworth has a Community Toilet Scheme, where they pay a business £1000 a year to allow non-customers to use their toilet. A Superloo (automatic public toilet) costs around £18000 a year to lease, and a public toilet building can easily cost a similar amount. Which is why Wandsworth can afford 18 community toilets for every public toilet in Islington.

I broke down the data (where possible) into several ‘types’ of toilet:

• Traditional public toilet (or ‘unspecified’)
• Superloo
• Park Toilet
• Council Buildings (excl. libraries)
• Libraries
• Sports Centres
• Tube/Train Stations
• Community Toilet Scheme
• Shopping Centres

The categories were determined by what was provided on the public toilet webpages. So because Brent‘s toilet page listed 2 Sports Centres, I added a Sports Centres column.  I did not then check to see if every other leisure centre in London did or did not have a publicly-accessible toilet, because I’m not insane. If it’s not on the toilet page, it’s not on the map.

(I was slightly nicer to Sutton. Whilst their toilet page only talked about the community toilet scheme, their separate pages on Libraries and Parks have very detailed accessibility info about the toilets provided, including photographs. Oh, and Merton have a pathetic 2 ‘community’ toilets, but also list loads of loos on a pdf about their parks. But I don’t feel good about it.)

So, to circumnavigate the problem of public toilet v. community toilet, I can split the data into two maps:

• Public Toilets (Traditional public toilets, Superloos and Park Toilets)

and

• Publicly Accessible Toilets (Council Buildings, Libraries, Sports Centres, Tube/Train Stations, Community Toilet Schemes and Shopping Centres, where listed.)

Map of Public Toilets (Traditional public toilets, Superloos and Park Toilets)

Public Toilets, incl. Superloos and Parks (when mentioned on council website)

Remarks:

• The range of public toilet numbers has calmed down considerably. The fewest is 0, the most is 28.
• 10 or 11 seems a popular number.
• The Star Councils, with over 20 each, are now Merton (thanks to a their ‘Parks’ pdf – they don’t have any public toilets outside of parks), Greenwich, Lewisham, Westminster, Kensington & Chelsea, and Enfield.
• What about our previous star, Wandsworth? They’re floundering a bit, with only 7 now that their community toilet scheme data’s been removed. Though not as badly as Richmond-upon-Thames, who have gone from 97 to 0. There. Are. No. Words.
• Lambeth also now suck – from 38 to 3. (not including parks. Lambeth’s page mentions that there are toilets in some parks, but you have to click on each of 21 parks to find out if there’s one there, and I can’t be bothered.)

It should be pretty clear now why councils like Community Toilet Schemes.

• Cheap.
• Council has no responsibility for cleanliness
• Council has no responsibility for maintenance
• Council has no responsibility for anti-social behaviour
• Council has no responsibility for accessibility
• Cheap.

Now don’t get me wrong – I like a community toilet scheme. It’s not just cheap, it’s good value for money. It ‘opens up’ a lot of facilities that were previously off-bounds (kinda) and you get a lot more frequent toilets (7 public toilets for 300 000 people is laughable from any angle). For places like Macdonalds that people use anyway, the store manager gets a few hundred pounds for the inconvenience.

However Community Toilet Schemes are blatantly being used as a reason to close existing public toilets, despite not being the same thing at all. We still need public toilets:

• in parks
• outside of business hours
• accessible for all
• for large groups
• for busy areas (markets, town centres, bus stations, tourist hotspots)

Anyways, community toilets and other publicly accessible toilets (that’s ‘any toilet the public can use without having to buy anything’) are an excellent way to supplement provision. So which councils excel at this?

Publicly Accessible Toilets (Council Buildings, Libraries, Sports Centres, Tube/Train Stations, Community Toilet Schemes and Shopping Centres.)

Remarks:

• About half the councils include some publicly-accessible toilets on their website.
• Quite a few councils have boosted their public toilet numbers by 20 to 50 toilets, i.e. doubling or quadrupling provision.
• Richmond & Wandsworth are really going for this Community Toilet thing.

The Purple Spot indicates an official Community Toilet Scheme. 

What’s interesting (to me) is that some boroughs list a lot of publicly accessible toilets, yet don’t have a spot: Hillingdon (20 publicly accessible toilets; in the north-west), Southwark (21 in the, er, middle), and Brent (18 toilets, north-middle).

This is my favourite approach to council websites (though if these councils were to have a community toilet scheme too, fantastic). They’ve doubled the number of publicly accessible toilets in their borough without spending a penny (so to speak).

Hillingdon’s public toilet webpage (actually just a link to a downloadable pdf) includes 11 superloos, 9 libraries, 9 tube/train stations and 2 shopping centres. The last 2 categories are nothing to do with the council, but it’s useful information.

If you want to find a toilet in, say, Westminster, as thousands do each day, do you care whether the toilet is managed by Westminster Council (location and opening times on Westminster Council’s webpage) or by the Royal Parks (location and opening times on the Royal Parks webpage)?

Southwark even included an ASDA, which they’ve every right to do as it’s a member of the Mayor of London’s Open London toilet scheme, a sort of big-brand community toilet scheme, who don’t get a grant on the basis that they’ve got all the cash. Every borough could include information on Tesco, M&S, ASDA, John Lewis and Sainsbury’s within their boundaries, as long as the store has a toilet.

Why don’t the councils provide information about all the toilets in the borough that the public can use, rather than just the ones that the council manage?  That would be a public service designed around the needs of the people, rather than the provider.

As I said at the beginning, this is all as much about public toilet web pages as it is about public toilet provision.

So what’s the best London Public Toilet Webpage?

Off the top of my head (if I can remember the webpage then it’s doing something right!) Here’s my Top 3.

• Kensington & Chelsea have a lot of information,
• City of London have recently made a nice map,
• Brent have both.

… Local Directgov

Local DirectGov, who are a central place that people can go to to search for local (government) services, have made a widget that allows you to ‘locate public toilets’ by typing in a postcode. In return it gives you a link to the council webpage for public toilets for the area that the postcode falls under.

Now, copy and pasting the html for that widget into my blog (post) doesn’t work (though I’m sure the widget does) which is a damn shame as I’m only writing this post as an excuse to try it out. However I don’t know html so beyond copy/paste there’s not much I can do about it.

Here’s a picture of it instead:

If you go to http://mycouncil.direct.gov.uk/index.html you can try the search for other council functions, or if you want to try adding ‘locate toilets’ or something else to your own site, you can try it yourself at http://innovate-apps.direct.gov.uk/widgets/localservices/

In any case, the toilet widget only works for postcodes in… London.

Here’s why.

Local Directgov don’t have the links to all the council webpages for public toilets. They never asked the councils for them and the councils never provided them.

… User-Centred Design – Urinal Games

An article was published yesterday about a company who are installing games for men to play whilst at the urinal. The game is controlled by peeing.

I’m recoiling already.

Not at the concept. I just hate talking about urinals. I don’t know anything about them. There is no more mysterious public space to a woman than the men’s toilets, and vice-versa (although I have been in the men’s at the RCA once for research purposes and was aghast at how much cleaner they were. What on earth are you all complaining about?)

The BBC’s article about the pee-game is very thorough.

Entitled ’Toilet gaming technology targets urinal boredom’..

 (‘boredom’? Are people really bored by peeing? I’m very understanding of different views, but if you pee enough to be bored by it, you should probably see a doctor)

..the game “sits above the normal oval ceramic urinal bowl, opening up a whole new world of entertainment…The user is presented with three generous targets to aim for in the urinal: stickers in the unit that read “Start”, “Left” and “Right”.”

… User-Centred Design – Toilet Roll Holders

We learnt quickly in our research project that any new idea that we had to improve public toilets had already been done, somewhere, by someone, to various degrees of success, whether it was a crowd-sourced toilet app, a new toilet roll holder or a customer feedback system…

… thius is why our Inclusive Design Guide to Publicly Accessible Toilets (pdf) contains lots of real, one-off examples from the Toilets of Britain, with very few of our own design concepts. One of my favourites was at Walsall Art Gallery which solved the age-old ergonomic issue of how to design sinks for both children and adults by providing… A Step-Stool.

Although there’s something wrong with pretty much every public toilet, it’s not that hard to get it right from a product design perspective.

It’s basically the same as for a toilet in a home – a loo, a sink, paper, soap, bin and a lockable door.

Yet for every lovely example of a new design that does something right (Dyson Hand-Dryers are such a huge improvement..) there’s a new design that does something wrong.

… Nine Elms

I feel like a bit of a loser.

I’ve just been to a public exhibition about the Nine Elms regeneration project, a huge chunk of London between Battersea and Vauxhall that will have ‘an anticipated 16000 new homes and 25000 new jobs’, including the redeveloped Battersea Power Station.

So me turning up to ask developers who are between them essentially building a new town if they’ve thought much about the public toilets feels a bit like asking where the postboxes are going to be. Although that also sounds quite interesting…

So why did I go?

It would have been easier not to go. I’m not even working today. I think “a mix of professional and personal interests’ might be my official response, but really my motivation came down to two things: guilt and nosiness.

(Actually that can be applied to almost every event I go to..)