Spirit of place: Cast iron urinals

You know I can never resist the call of the weird, and after I posted my trail around the Green Men of Birmingham a friend expressed disbelief that there were enough cast iron urinals left in the city to constitute a trail in and of themselves, and of course I had to rise to the challenge. The first is one that you can't see any more, because as the article above says it was dismantled to make way for the ICC in the 90s, but nonetheless forms a better start to this post than many of the derelict ones would.

So let's begin outside of the city centre. The first one is the only one of these that one can actually micturate in at present. It's in Harborne High Street and since that picture was taken it's been painted a sort of burgundy colour rather than the authentic green in the picture. I don't think the interior is completely original by any stretch of the imagination, however I always think pointing percy in the open air with buses going past is a fond memory of how life used to be, before you had to pay, often as much as 30p, to go into one of those strange Tardis contraptions. The next one is in Balsall Heath: I have been unable to find where it is in more detail than that, and have never seen it in the flesh, so have no idea what sort of state it is in now.

The majority of them are in the city centre, and the majority of those are in Digbeth. This, the most photogenic one, is in Allison Street.

This one, in Oxford Street, shows how they were imaginatively slotted into railway arches and odd corners. I don't dislike the colour this one is painted: better they be painted and preserved, than left in blistering green paint for authenticity's sake and allowed to disintegrate.

Great Barr Street. This one is actually opposite a pub and must have seen many scenes of drunk men rushing in at closing times. If only that light could speak of the many scenes it must have seen! This one was in use until relatively recently, and was closed in the council's splurge of closing most of the conveniences in the city.

Moving over to the Jewellery Quarter, these three pictures are of the same one, in Ludgate Hill, that I posted about before. I found pictures of the interior of this one, since this is about the only opportunity you'll get to see what these loos look like inside. Running water only to the urinals and no basins. This is the one that was a notorious sting site for the police. A friend of a friend put flowers outside this one when it was finally boarded up.

Right by Jewellery Quarter station is this one, formerly known as the Temple of Relief.

That's it for the cast iron urinals that I know of. No doubt there are more - there are rumours of one in Cape Hill or Smethwick, but I don't know where it is and wouldn't call that Birmingham. To prevent anyone thinking I've got a thing for cottages, I'm going to add a few more loos on here that I've been wanting to talk about under the heading of spirit of place, and get them out of the way and move on to other stuff. This one is one sexy art deco convenience. You can't see it as it looks in the picture, and I've never seen it except for some tiling poking out from behind the hoarding that's hidden it for years. Digbeth again, needless to say.

And this is what it looks like now: this mural was moved from St Chad's Circus in the road alterations, and has been put there. A good use of the mural. I love that dead 60s mural anyway.

Finally a cottage - an actual cottage - which isn't there any more. This one was known as the 'silver slipper' on account of the ballet shop near it, and was round the back of New Street Station, before the station's last going over. This loo is a genuine part of local gay history.

The pub in those days was the Victoria Arms, which I think is gone now, quite close to the Smallbrook Queensway, and nearby was the Silver Slipper which was this cottage down below the street, quite close to New Street Station.  Everybody went down there.  Oh gosh, the things that went on there would make your hair curl.  Generally some of the liaisons there would be absolutely outrageous with very little care about who might not be coming in because it wasn’t all gay guys that went down there, there were some straight guys as well.  The Silver Slipper had two entrances and absolutely palatial marble stands and marble tiles but occasionally it would get raided by the cops and emptied into vans and then, of course, everybody would come rushing into the bar. ‘The Slipper’s been raided’ so nobody would go there for a couple of days.  Most of the little cottages around Birmingham would be very busy, very busy indeed because it was where we met, we had the odd bar but we didn’t have many bars and the landlords were making money, that was all they were interested in but, the moment there was any threat to them or their licence, they would pull out and they wouldn’t be gay anymore.  So you could go one week it would be gay and the next week it wouldn’t.  It was as flexible as that.”

“In the cottages, we’d do everything, oh everything, yeah, everything, every single thing. AIDS hadn’t raised its head by then but there was VD, of course.  That’s why we’re mostly what we are now.  It’s getting less now, of course, but – yes, sex in toilets was from masturbation to full blown sex, lurve if you like, and everything in between.”

“We’d use lube or saliva but I think the more gentlemen amongst us would probably carry a lube of some kind, probably Vaseline because although I think KY’s always been around, it was rather expensive and still is.  But, yeah, it would probably be Vaseline because of the little tins.  The police search your handbag and they find a tin of Vaseline in there.  You can’t always have cracked lips, can you?”

“The places would get raided, I think probably mostly through hetero complaints or if somebody had been arrested somewhere else and they’d say where else do you go and they’d say we go down the Silver Slipper down behind the Station and, therefore, it would be watched.  Because they took great delight these people, as I’ve already said, Gestapo tactics were the norm and they were pretty awful people the majority of them.  They were coppers by default, I would have thought.”

“I was never arrested, touch wood, but my partner was, and several of my friends have been over the years.  I’ve had friends who have committed suicide because of being found cottaging and then the families don’t know anything about it.  That’s pretty ghastly.  But, no, I was tarred with the same brush, I think they (the Police) were all bastards anyway and I think they probably still are but they’ve got less power as regards gay, I mean, now.  They still arrest us for cottaging, of course, but it’s not a really practised thing these days because cottages have all been closed and they've gone into restaurants now, haven’t they? Shops and restaurants didn’t have to supply public toilets anyway so it was a public convenience thing to have these places and it was very convenient to a lot of us.” Source

 And just in case anyone should be querying the use of the word 'cottage', surely the picture of the one in Bearwood (where there also used to be a cast iron urinal down the side of the Bear pub) should explain the name!

The gentleman is Barry Hall, a seriously good chef and I can't recommend his restaurant Azzari Too highly enough. He wants to turn half of the cottage into a deli. Seriously.

Addendum 27.3.14: I have recently taken the opportunity to pop into the urinal in Harborne and take a picture before making my offering to Cloacina, since it seems there was no picture of what I believe to be the only cast iron urinal still open and available for use in the area. The stainless steel urinal is no doubt not original: certainly the one in Livery Street had individual porcelain urinals.
I have also passed the one in Oxford Street and found the boarding at one side was broken. Obviously it was completely dark inside and I had no way of knowing what was in there, but I put my blackberry in and took a picture. Unfortunately, what I got was a picture of a complete glazed-brick interior like the Harborne one, and a sleeping bag as evidence that someone is obviously sleeping rough in there. Following my policy of not publishing pictures of other people's bedrooms I will not publish the picture here, and I also took no further pictures so have no idea what condition it is in apart from the wall of glazed bricks.