Clara Greed, for her part, likes the idea of gender-free washrooms, but won’t stand for them if it means the removal of women-only spaces. She points out the prohibition against sharing such space with biological males among some Muslim women, fundamentalist Christian women, Hindu women, and Orthodox Jewish women. She says there’s a social function of public bathrooms that’s being lost with sex desegregation: ‘The public toilet is one of the few places left where women can be actually separated from men.’
Uprisings of any stripe are becoming more complicated, at least in England and its surrounds. Whereas North Americans, and certainly Canadians, haven’t enjoyed much on-street public provision, the UK has a long tradition of recognizing the need for stand-alone public bathrooms in city centres (even if they have been designed, in the main, for men – more on that in chapter six). But today, public toilets are disappearing. A 2016 BBC report found, through Freedom of Information requests, that at least 1,782 facilities had closed across the UK in the preceding decade. In London alone, it’s estimated that about half of council-managed public bathrooms have closed: city governments don’t see their value justifying the cost of their maintenance. Some of London’s ornate underground Victorianera facilities are being sold off and transformed into kicky little cafés and hip restaurants. I love charcuterie, sure, but there is a limit. Today’s toilet campaigns, increasingly, aren’t for better provision, but to keep what’s there now.
Greed turns to the business case. When visitors come to Britain, she says, ‘they are disgusted by our public toilets and the lack of facilities.’ But she’s also convinced that better provision helps breathe life into dusty downtowns. Public bathrooms, she argues, are far from money down the drain. ‘I keep asking god for a toilet miracle, but I haven’t seen one yet. It’s like the miracle of the five thousand loaves and fishes. I want five thousand more toilets.’
3
SOME HISTORICAL SHIT
Someone wipes her bottom, drops a pre-moistened flushable wipe into the toilet bowl, and watches the swirling mess sloosh south. In a restaurant down the street, an employee pours the dregs of a kettle of fryer oil into a sink drain and watches the warm, lardish goo gurgle down. Then each walks away from the place her home or work connects to the underground wonder of the modern sewer. I mean, that’s how it’s supposed to go, right? The sewers lie waiting for our worst. They accept our shit, our shower water, and our tampons; our flushable wipes, used medications, and the leftover fat from our Sunday-morning bacon and eggs. Our approach to sewers is dump and run. We rarely give these accepting labyrinthine marvels a thought.
Until the sewers push back.
The pipe leading from that home and the pipe exiting that restaurant connect at a trunk line, well below the sidewalk and street. By this point, the hot fat is no longer hot. And the flushable wipe, while flushable in name, is not in nature – wipes are designed to withstand being wet for long periods in storage and hold their shape even in the face of sustained abuse. The wipe enters the trunk line as durable as ever, swimming along with dozens of equally sturdy tampons, applicators, and used condoms. It snags on a sewer wall. On it, the congealing fryer fat finds a home. More fat from more restaurants passes and sticks. More wipes from more homes greet the tumescent mess, along with more tampons, more sanitary pads… You get the scene. The New York City Department of Environmental Protection estimated in 2015 that wet wipes had cost the city $18 million for blockageclearing and disposal over the previous five years. And used cooking oil is a problem for sewers all over. Austin, Texas; Washington, D.C.; and Tulsa, Oklahoma, have all started ad campaigns begging homeowners to quit dumping leftovers down their sinks. Animal fats, vegetable oils, and lard – even dairy products – stick to the walls of sewers like cholesterol plaque on the inside of an artery.
The frightening apotheosis of this problem is the mythically dubbed fatberg – a terrifying blob that adheres to the walls of sewers like concrete. A fatberg the size of a double-decker bus was discovered under Kingston in 2013 by Thames Water, London, England’s water and sewage utility. In 2017, the biggest fatberg on record was discovered under the Whitechapel district, the kind of monster that makes the 2013 Kingston fatberg sound quaint: more than ten times bigger, and longer than two football pitches. The Museum of London put a portion of it on display in 2018 (exhibition title: Fatberg!). Thames Water crews – eight members strong, working seven days a week – took two and a half months to remove this puppy. No doubt all the while looking over their shoulders for the next fatberg around the sewer bend.
See, these things really do pop up out of nowhere. Sure, it seems wild to imagine something growing, undetected, underneath your house that’s the length of eleven double-decker buses, like the Whitechapel fatberg. But the whopping great volumes of oil from restaurant fryers and residential cooking, congealing around sewer joints and the reams of wet wipes, collect bit by bit by tiny bit. One frying pan of bacon fat? How could that hurt? A tampon here? Some dental floss there? No biggie. No one pictures these minor cast-offs mixing with gelling blubber to become a sturdy fecal-fat blob looming below the asphalt. Yet Thames Water clears some forty thousand fat blockages a year. The pinguid terror of the Kingston fatberg was only discovered when residents reported trouble getting their toilets to flush. As Simon Evans, a Thames Water spokesman, told the Guardian, technicians discovered a ‘heaving, sick-smelling, rotting mass of filth and feces’ stuck to the roof of a neighbourhood trunk line. The good news? Kingston upon Thames avoided – narrowly – having the contents of its every toilet bubbling up out of powderroom loos and laundry-room sinks.
Modern city sewer systems, despite the abuse they withstand, have limits. And in growing cities, it’s not only flushing the unflushable and draining the undrainable that sinks the sewers, it’s a simple question of volume: the more of us there are, the more shit we collectively produce. And the more shit we produce, the better we have to be at finding different ways of dealing with it. Humans have the benefit of millennia in our back pockets on this one. But different and better aren’t exactly the hallmarks of our relationship with removing what we excrete. Consider: North Americans and Europeans sit down daily to poo into water we’ve spent gobs of cash to purify to drinking quality. It’s, well…stupid. Why treat water only to foul it with bacteria- and microbe-laden turds and flush it away? Because we started doing it that way a long time ago, built massive unretrofitable plumbing and sewage systems to support our little quirk, and haven’t found the will or the way to shake it since.
We’re married to our toilets. But we’re sticking together more out of habit than love. And perhaps out of fear of what we’d do without them. Toilets long before the toilet we know today were mere ditches in the ground. In Deuteronomy 23:12−14, Moses lays out a biblical code for where and how to relieve thyself, and the Bible, on this count, is the quintessence of right-headedness: walk away from areas where people congregate, and bring a spade to cover up your turds. (Linguistically, I’ll grant, the scripture is more elegant.) Moses was a sensible fellow, clearly, but I suspect he was codifying custom rather than making headline news. In ancient cities, things got more complicated. It’s harder to get away from your neighbours when there are forty thousand of them, as there were in Jesus-era Jerusalem. Soon enough, many great civilizations – Indians, Chinese, Babylonians, and Minoans among them – figured out that water worked brilliantly to wash away waste. But no one rocked early sewage removal like the Ancient Romans. They employed aqueducts to move water, reused grey water from their public baths for irrigation, and, like many other cultures, collected urine and feces as fertilizers for growing food. The Roman sewer system during the time of Pliny the Elder served a whopping one million urban dwellers altogether.
And all together.
In the Roman Empire, toilets were public. And public meant really, really public