Public washrooms and toilet cubicles are often assumed to be plentiful in public areas such as towns, cities, parks and events venues, and that means that many people only notice them when they are not there.
This is, in some respects, good. If nobody is talking about the toilet facilities, it means that they are working very well as they were designed, with a remarkable impact on a public area that is often underappreciated or under-analysed.
If people know that public washrooms are available, are safe, secure and reliable, then they will feel comfortable going to a location and spending more time there in comfort, as opposed to being confined by a concept known as the urinary leash.
Whilst the term is very new, the idea of the importance of public toilets for sanitation very much is not, and in fact, some of the earliest civilisations understood the need for public washrooms long before they became an unwavering standard in industrialised cities.
The Toilets Of Skara Brae
Whilst the flushing toilet as we know it today dates back to the work of Sir John Harington, nearly 5000 years before this, there was evidence of early settlements developing rudimentary sanitation channels, sewers and even flushing toilets.
One of the earliest of these was found in the Neolithic settlement of Skara Brae, in the Orkneys, and whilst it is impossible to completely date the creation of the construction of the toilets themselves, it is quite possible that the ancient island settlement had the first indoor toilets ever made.
They were somewhat basic, relying on channels, gravity and the lapping of water from the nearby streams and the North Sea to carry the body waste away from the settlement, but the fundamental principle being in place thousands of years before the Roman aqueducts is astonishing.
Around the same time as this in the Mesopotamian city of Eshnunna (now part of Tell Asmar, Iraq), the Northern Palace demonstrate some of the earliest toilets in the private homes of a city, which highlights that for as long as the world has had cities, they have been grappling with how to handle bodily waste.
Whilst pit toilets and latrines have existed and were more commonly used at the time, the fact that there were developments in designing buildings with indoor toilets that channelled away waste on different sides of the world highlights how much of a universal consideration sanitation is.
It was also the first example of modular sanitation design, as the clay pipes could be easily replaced and detached, so they could be cleaned more easily.
The most fascinating example of early toilets, however, is on the Greek island of Crete.
In the Palace of Minos at Knossos, most famous today for the myth of Theseus, the Labyrinth and the Minotaur, perhaps the greatest legacy of the Minoans is the development of the first flushing toilet, or at least the earliest one to survive, dating between 1700 and 1300 BC.
How it worked was that a cistern filled with rain water was stored near a room with a hole, a wooden seat and a clay channel. This water subsequently flushes waste into a large stone sewer and away from the palace.
A similar system was found at Akrotiri in Crete, and a similar system was found in Mohenjo-daro, Harappa and Lothal, three cities that were part of the Indus Valley Civilisation based in modern-day Pakistan.
Whilst most of the ruins of the Indus Civilisation used pit latrines or pots, evidence of flushable toilets were found made of brick, which were flushed using jugs of water that had already been used for washing.
However, the most interesting recent discovery when it comes to the connection between early civilisation and early public toilets was found in the Yueying site in Xi’an, China.
Claimed to be 2400 years old, dating it to the Warring States Period of China, the design was believed to have been located inside a nearby palace, with pipes that led waste to an outdoor latrine pit thanks to water poured into it.
The first major public toilet initiative was developed by the Ancient Romans, who also designed one of the first complex sewer systems. Whilst it was not always used, as there is evidence of chamber pots and pit latrines being used in some parts of the Roman Empire, the public toilets were remarkably commonplace and efficient.
All of this demonstrates that the need for sanitation and public washrooms is as old as humanity itself, and the provision of toilets shapes social spaces.
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