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Jenny McCartney

The smelly, snobbish death of the English public toilet

In England, people dislike talking about lavatories in public. So soon, they will have no public lavatories

12 March 2016

9:00 AM

12 March 2016

9:00 AM

I blame Nancy Mitford: she made the English so frightened of saying ‘toilet’ that now they have hardly any left — of the public variety, that is, the sort that traditionally proved so useful to anyone who wanted to do a daring thing like leaving the house.

I’m quite happy with ‘toilet’ personally, being from Belfast, where pretending to be ‘U’ is a greater source of potential embarrassment than simply being ‘Non-U’ like everyone else.

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