… 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..)

How to make… a UK Public Toilet Map

Our funding application to continue developing public toilet open data and The Great British Public Toilet Map was rejected by the Economic & Social Research Council (ESRC)

Our research into public toilets was funded by the ESRC. When a research project ends, there is sometimes ‘follow-on funding’ available, in order to develop anything unexpected that has come out of the work (rather than letting all that work go to waste!).

Our proposal for follow-on funding had 3 reviewers.

• One reviewer LOVED it.
• The second thought it ‘extremely worthy‘ , but had trouble understanding what we proposed to do, which is our fault.
• The third thought it ‘extremely important‘, but that local government, or their national bodies like the Local Government Association, should be the ones undertaking this work (and not the ESRC) or at least providing the funding, since public toilets are in their remit.

… The Open Data Consultation

The government have written 2 consultation documents about the future of open data. One is about the planned Public Data Corporation, the other was called Making Open Data Real.

I could write about the flaws of public consultations, but it’s been brutal enough just to write a response, particularly after reading the unintelligible consultation questions and other people’s intelligent hollistic business-y responses. Indeed I chickened out entirely several times.

However, after banging my head against open data problems for over a year now I think I could claim an ‘informed opinion’, and so I’ve completely ignored the consultation questions written about what I know.

In the spirit of openness, here it is:

… Progress

For 2 years I’ve been researching ways to improve public toilets for older people, as part of the TACT3 project to help older people to manage continence concerns.

This soon became an inclusive design project to improve all publicly accessible toilet provision for people of all ages.

Rather than going down the ‘traditional’ product design route, I took a service design approach – applying the research, process and creativity of a designer to the design of a service.

I did this because:

• It interests me
• there’s no money for redesigning toilets
• Toilets have been redesigned, but people don’t follow the guidance
• Suggesting improvement to a service can have a wider impact, and needn’t cost much at all
• It’s relevant to the biggest providers – local government
• It seemed like the right thing to do

2 things came out of the project: a website called The Great British Public Toilet Map, and a publication called Publicly Accessible Toilets: An Inclusive Design Guide, which was actually funded by the ESRC Connected Communities programme as part of our 6-month concurrent research project called RATs – Robust Accessible Toilets – looking at conflicts between ‘Design out Crime’ guidance and Inclusive Design.

… The Great British Public Toilet Map, v.1

We made a first version of The Great British Public Toilet Map.

Click on the map to go to the website.

It’s not really a toilet map.

It will be, when there’s more data (initially for London – this link tells you why). At the moment, it’s more a way of seeing the data that’s available, and asking for more.

… The Australian Public Toilet Map

Would you believe I’ve barely ever mentioned the Australian Public Toilet Map www.toiletmap.gov.au, despite it being my secret weapon in presentations about the idea of making a UK map of our public toilets.

It began in the early 2000′s, commissioned by the Department of Health & Ageing as part of their National Continence Management Strategy (the fact that these two things exist is a marvel in itself)

It says: “The National Public Toilet Map (the Toilet Map) shows the location of more than 14,000 public and private public toilet facilities across Australia. Details of toilet facilities can also be found along major travel routes and for shorter journeys as well. Useful information is provided about each toilet, such as location, opening hours, availability of baby change rooms, accessibility for people with disabilities and the details of other nearby toilets.”

… Not So Public Toilets

“I’m starting to think that, actually, we don’t need more public toilets…”

This was the guilty whisper of one toilet expert of my acquaintance during another of our obsessive rants research meetings.

For years (decades in fact), organisations have been counting and objecting to the decline in public toilets. 10% decline over this period… 20% down over another… etc.

However the overall numbers don’t tell the real story.

For one thing, the term ‘public toilets’ doesn’t take into consideration shopping centre toilets, department store toilets, supermarket toilets, train station toilets, etc…

Yet all of these Not So Public Toilets are available, to varying degrees, for the public to use, be it at the discretion of the private-manager.

Public toilets sprang to life in the Victorian age, from a culture of ‘cleanliness is next to Godliness’ and the philanthropic attitude of the upper classes towards the poor, filthy masses.

… more from Ordnance Survey

I’ve just had another reply from Ordnance Survey, which I think, due to its clarity, draws a line under something – namely councils publishing the OS public toilet point data as OpenData, even though the council know where their toilets are, and, indeed, put them there in the first place.

(unless you choose a different interpretation of the licence, which is none of my business.).

I’ve published their response first, as it’s more interesting. My email that they’re responding to is afterwards, and a little grumpier than I care for.

… more Open Data Councils

I’ve been doing some housekeeping

Namely making a spreadsheet of all the councils that I’ve contacted to ask if they would be able to make a dataset of info about their public toilets (location, opening hours etc) so that people who wish to make maps and apps to find toilets can make better ones.

I gave myself a fighting chance by only contacting councils that already publish some other free-to-use datasets (‘open data’) on their web pages, based on this list at openlylocal.com.

Anyway, here’s my spreadsheet for anyone into these things.

It’s interesting (no, really) because I included notes about the councils’ responses.

Link to my public toilet open data spreadsheet in Google Docs. 

I’m trying really hard to focus on all the helpful councils that created data or even explained forlornly why they could not. 

… Inclusive Design

The problem with a blog about public toilets is that I can’t just write about anything – it’s meant to be loo-related.

My current strop about my walk to work relates to pedestrian-friendly cities, urban design and inclusive design, as do public toilets, so I reckon that’s enough to tie it in. For anyone who disagrees, I’ll add a loo-count*

Yesterday I made a map of my walk to work, showing the pedestrian crossings at crossroads (and one busy side street). Green is a pedestrian crossing at a traffic light, red is no crossing, and yellow is a zebra crossing.

Click map to enlarge