In a dark, damp underground chamber in south London, a council worker is trying to explain why a century-old public toilet could be the ideal setting for a flower shop. Torchlight darts across rusty taps and porcelain caked in dirt. Water drips down the walls and paint peels from the ceiling. On a table, an old rotary phone has been left off the hook as if abandoned mid-call. Although it is a mild day outside, down here it is freezing.
But what looks like the set of a horror film is a space that Lambeth council hopes can become a new hotspot. Abandoned since the 1980s, these facilities in Brixton’s Windrush Square are now on the market for development. Suggested uses include “retail, café, restaurant, bar, gallery” and “shared workspace”.
Shopping, drinking or taking your laptop down to a windowless room that used to be a public lavatory may not sound appealing but Lambeth is not the first council to have this idea. Across London, the number of bars, restaurants and coffee shops housed in disused toilets has reached double digits. Instead of being coy about their origins, many developers are choosing to make it a feature.
At Attendant, a “speciality coffee and brunch café” located in an old Victorian loo in Fitzrovia, customers sit on bar stools at the original urinals, eating their avocado toast under a large white cistern.
Across the Thames, the Bermondsey Arts Club is a former WC turned speakeasy-themed cocktail bar. Look beyond the black piano and art deco fittings and the porcelain-white wall tiles hint at its past. One bartender admits that he finds it difficult to forget what the venue used to be. That is, he says, “until about 11pm when a hundred or so people come in”.
Andy Bell, who opened WC, a pair of wine and charcuterie bars located in an old Edwardian bathroom in Clapham and a Grade II Victorian toilet in Bloomsbury, says that he and his partner wanted to preserve the history of the sites. “Our whole idea was trying to use as much of the existing design and architecture as possible without putting people off drinking and eating.”
For some of London’s indebted local councils, repurposing public conveniences as bars, brunch spots and other commercial uses brings in much-needed income and restores life to old buildings.
But the developments also highlight a decline in the city’s public services. According to a report published by Age UK this year, London has lost almost 100 public toilets in the past decade. In February, the British Toilet Association launched a campaign calling for a legal obligation to be placed on councils to provide more public lavatories.
Some councils have tried to get around the problem of dwindling public facilities via community toilet schemes — restaurants, bars and shops providing, sometimes for a fee, clean, safe and accessible toilets for the public as well as their customers.
Still, Londoners may feel that a bathroom in the corner of a café is no replacement for the Victorian splendour of those mothballed WCs — especially when other global cities are building inviting new facilities.
In Japan, for example, the Tokyo Toilet Project brought together architects and designers to rebuild 17 unique public lavatories in the Shibuya area between 2020 and 2023. The results, celebrated in the Oscar-nominated film Perfect Days by Wim Wenders, include outdoor, high-tech cubicles made from coloured glass walls that turn opaque when the door is locked.
Another design, a cedar-clad restroom of individual huts linked by walkways, was created to blend in with the park where it was built. The project is intended to be a symbol of Japanese hospitality.
Back in London, such lavish facilities are rare outside commercial developments. New public services are thin on the ground and not known for their grandeur. Some charge customers and operate within limited hours.
At Brixton’s disused subterranean toilets, at least one person seems to think the space should be returned to its original purpose. Not long after a rental notice went up, the graffitied insertion of an ‘i’ turned the site’s “To Let” sign into “Toilet”.
ben.parr@ft.com
