Many of you are probably thinking ‘will the Runoff EVER get around to doing a piece on public conveniences?’ Well, due to the popularity of a few Insta pics (if you haven’t already, please join us there as we’re loads of fun) we’ve decided to create an article about the long closed Victorian public convenience in Kennington Cross, which is currently on the rental market.
The Kennington Cross WC was engineered by B. Finch & Co. in 1898 in a Victorian movement to make London a more hygienic place (read ‘so blokes wouldn’t pee in the street’). It features an array of beautiful marble and iron urinals with a glass tank on top, three cubicles, a mosaic tile floor and a booth for attendants. To keep the critters occupied while nature calls, at the street level there is a horse/cattle trough (1880) that precedes the WC. Sadly, Lambeth Council closed the toilet in 1988 but since then a headstrong group of volunteers have endeavoured to keep it falling to middle earth. Whoever rents this unique property will need to be conscious that it is, thank the urinal gods, Grade 2 listed.
Over the past ten years, clever people have been turning disused toilets into equally clever things. There is a cute mini chain of wine/charcuterie bars called ‘WC’ and we’ve visited the one in Bloomsbury. The closest ours has to come to anything that interesting is when it was a pop up arts venue called ‘Arts Lav’ in 2017. At 387 square feet we think it might be too small to be converted into a bar or even a tea shop, but one person who got in touch told us that he was married in the toilets, so in reality it could be converted into anything. Whatever it might be, it will hopefully be developed into something that we can all visit and appreciate.
