The keepers of the English language at Oxford can’t say for certain where the term loo, a common British slang for bathroom, comes from. Though it’s historically and etymologically suspect, the explanation I like best argues that loo comes from the French phrase ‘Regardez l’eau!’ – bastardized by the English as ‘Gardy loo!’ – which could accurately be translated as ‘Heads up, whoever’s traipsing down the street below this open window, because it’s about to start raining the contents of a full chamber pot.’
There was shit, frankly, sloshed all over medieval Europe. It was tossed from homes into street-level ditches. It was launched from holes in settlement walls. It rotted in turgid cesspits. It bunged up rivers that once freely flowed. The sewer sense of the Roman Empire may not have been perfect – they too allowed waste into rivers and steams – but their successors literally threw their advances out the window. London’s first major sanitary acts weren’t passed until the thirteenth century. They prohibited pigs from running (and, presumably, shitting) in the streets, and demanded an end to on-street tallow-rendering, solder-melting, and the flaying of dead horses. By 1300, people were asked to please stop hurling their poo into the streets. All solid ideas, for sure. Except no one seemed to do much about them. Animals and humans and all their sundry waste communed endlessly in cities and villages. There was little in the way of organized sewage disposal. The population of High Middle Ages Europe was about eighty million; in overcrowded urban spaces, bodies were everywhere and so were their by-products. Writer Bill Bryson notes in his book At Home: A Short History of Private Life that Italian adventurer Giacomo Casanova, on a visit to London, frequently ‘saw someone “ease his sluices” in full public view along roadsides or against buildings.’
Science writer David Waltner-Toews, in The Origin of Feces: What Excrement Tells Us about Evolution, Ecology, and a Sustainable Society, calls the narrative of shit ‘one of fits and starts.’ It’s an APT characterization. The oldest recorded ‘flush’ toilet was at Crete’s palace of Knossos, dating from 1700 bce. That might as well have been a ghost loo; it mysteriously disappeared. The Romans got things chugging along nicely, then screwed the sanitation pooch when they lost the empire. Exceptions also punctuated the medieval era of dire squalidity – Henry III ordered the maintenance of a Thames-bound underground drainage system at Palace of Westminster and watercourses ran under some monastery dormitories. Tudor times saw the establishment of drop toilets – seats with open bottoms that either hung over exterior castle moats or were built inside closets in homes (and from which feces and urine dropped down into a basement cesspit). The idea was for the poo to fall away from the poo-ers. Pity the wretched workers who had to hand-clean the moats and dig out the basement trenches, not least of all because excavations of medieval and Tudor privies suggest humans were bursting with parasites. The job of the so-called night-soil man wasn’t an envied one. Sir John Harington, the godson of Queen Elizabeth I, built the first mechanical flush toilet in 1596, installing one at Richmond Palace for Her Majesty and one in his own home. The Queen mustn’t have been all that amused. She died seven years later, and the Harington model was never seen again.
Outhouses and chamber pots proved fecally sufficient for the next two centuries, until an explosion of lavatorial concoctions based on Harington’s original flusher hit England in the last quarter of the eighteenth century. First came Alexander Cummings, an horologist; next, Joseph Bramah, a locksmith; after them, loads more inventors got into the game. You’ll want to know here about the name synonymous with early water closets: Thomas Crapper. Let me flush your assumptions. Crapper did not invent the toilet, and the slang word crap predates the man himself. He was a plumber by trade, and a genius marketer by nature. Crapper created the first bathroom showroom, distributing the inventions of others and adding his company name to the fixtures. He was a whiz at nudging forward the desirability of indoor outhouses. Though as the Victorian era progressed, our collective Western disgust at urine and feces began to fix and intensify and our relationship with getting rid of our waste changed indelibly.
Conjure the stench of two and a half million bowel-loads of feces dropped daily into the Thames. Imagine it combined with the ascending Hades of a London summer. Imagine all that feces and urine, plus whatever else – animal corpses, rotten food, industrial waste – Londoners felt like chucking into the Thames, literally fermenting in the June heat. Picture the top of the city’s main river as a bubbly fecal froth. No surprise they dubbed the summer of 1858 the Great Stink.
Now picture Joseph Bazalgette to the rescue, a hero in muttonchops. Bazalgette was the civil engineer who designed London’s modern sewage system. He was first put to the task during the Great Stink, when olfactory offensiveness reached such heights that the curtains of Parliament were closed and doused with lime chloride, and London’s flâneurs held perfumed cloths to their noses and mouths, lest they faint from the fetor. It was gross.
It’s not as if everything had been hunky-dorky in London before 1858. The poor suffered in close quarters with their own waste and that of their neighbours. Cesspits were the norm. The Thames and other rivers stagnated under the burden of feces (all those progressive thirteenth-century acts to help clean up the streets instructed Londoners to remove their filth and flayed horses directly to the Thames). But the Great Stink was different. It was the first time the practice of dumping raw sewage into a body of water had affected such great numbers of Londoners. Not only that, but it was the first episode, really, where it affected people who otherwise weren’t much involved in taking close care of their excreta. The castle- and manor-dwelling drop-toilet crowd certainly weren’t down in the moats and cesspits slopping their shit into buckets. Parliamentary caucuses weren’t likely in the habit of hearing from night-soil men.
The Great Stink was just the kick in the arse needed to get the city driving toward the modern waste-management era. There was something in the air – literally, in London, but metaphorically in many other major cities, too. Paris, New York, and Toronto embarked on their modern storm and sanitary sewer systems around the same time as Bazalgette got his assignment in London. Chicago started in the 1860s; Washington, DC, in the 1880s. Many Commonwealth countries and those under colonial rule took a nod from the practices of the English and got moving on major sewer projects before the turn of the twentieth century.
That modern sewers were needed had everything to do with the rise of flush toilets from about 1800 onward. Toilets after early tinkerers Cummings and Bramah were increasingly reliable and less smelly – and so more welcome inside homes. Barbara Penner, the architectural historian, has found evidence of about two hundred thousand dotting London around the time of the Great Stink, adding volume to the Thames’ woes Bazalgette was charged with making better. It could have been worse – indoor flush toilets at this time were firmly the preserve of England’s wealthy, a norm that lasted into the 1920s. Multi-family outhouses were common in some urban areas even through the 1960s and 1970s. If the Great Stink almost shut down Parliament, imagine how much greater the stink if flush toilets had then been as common as they are today.
What the indoor bathroom also changed was the notion that toileting (and, for that matter, bathing) was a communal exercise. With interior water closets, it became possible to enjoy complete privacy while urinating and defecating.