Nothing to see here any more, but a red brick and sandstone temple of convenience once stood here, just in front of the railway arch.
This was actually at the end of the street where I grew up. A particularly grim trough, as I recall; Vulnerable to wind-blown litter and leaves, and neglected by the council, I can still see the cracked, browning glaze and 70s graffiti in my mind's eye. A lost gem.
A childhood memory of junior school cricket, played on a long-gone ground now given over to grazing sheep. That was 100 metres down the road from here: This enigmatic sandstone wall, overgrown with shrubbery has was once a public urinal.
You can just about make out the bricked-up entrance and exit. I wonder if the leaf-filled, mossy urinal trough is still behind the wall? One for future archaeologists, I feel.
It was a useful place to have a pee on the way home after cricket, but it's been bricked up for at least thirty years.
It puzzles me as to why it was thought necessary to have public conveniences in such an incongruous place in the first place.
Introduction:
The Victorian and Edwardian planners who designed the Industrial Revolution townscape were visionaries: Foresighted forefathers who understood that working people needed somewhere to take a leak.
In recognition of this necessity, they placed "public conveniences" around our towns - and with as much a sense of civic pride as they showed with their grandiose town halls, public libraries and parks.
In these less enlightened, austere, times, many of these public conveniences have been lost, abandoned, or closed altogether. Vandalism, neglect, penny-pinching and a blinkered disregard for the needs of the people who visit our town centres have seen a catastrophic decline in these once-ubiquitous cathedrals of relief.
Come with me on a journey of discovery in praise of the Lost Toilets of Barrow in Furness.
