Britain's busted flush

"Let a publicke benefit expell privat bashfulnesse," implored John Harington, favourite godson of Elizabeth I and prominent among the crowded pantheon of British toilet heroes. He was decrying the barriers to such sanitary improvements as his flushing water-closet, which he invented in 1596. That same inhibition, often masked by humour, prevents us from seeing in the toilet a powerful barometer of the health of society as a whole. "British public toilets have been in freefall," says Richard Chisnell, chairman of the British Toilet Association (BTA), and we may recognise in their decline and privatisation a wider sign of the ever diminishing public sphere.

Mores are rarely stronger than around those doings for which toilets were designed and we are inclined to assume that our modern ways were ever thus, including the apparent inevitability of private provision of once public goods. But toilets show that not to be so. A millennium before Christ, the citizens of Troy, Julie Horan records in her book, The Porcelain God, were thought to have defecated in public, out in the open. For the ancient Romans, public latrines were as sociable a place as the baths.

A golden age

Much closer to our own time, Louis XIV of France would entertain guests while seated on his close-stool; he thought it rude to leave a gathering for the toilet. His courtiers would pay handsomely to attend his "petit coucher", his final deposit before bedtime. It was not until the end of the 18th century in Britain that the bodily shyness Harington hinted at solidified and the excretory functions came to be viewed, in Horan's words, as no longer "natural and inevitable" but something to be "hidden and ignored".

Yet it was also in the Victorian era that Britain's lavatorial superiority reached its height. Spurred on by fears of epidemics, principally of cholera, among the labouring poor, a triumvirate of toilet pioneers founded a sanitary empire in Britain that the world would seek to emulate.

That achievement has now dwindled to the point that public toilets have halved in number in the past decade, and imminent changes to the Public Health Act will facilitate, through more charging for use, privatisation of this most necessary of public goods.

The Victorians invented the toilet mechanism that, barely altered, we still use today. For the public, such changes have taken some getting used to. For centuries, the chamber pot was the preferred container, its contents quite acceptably tossed out into the street. A century before, notes Lucinda Lambton in her book Temples of Convenience and Chambers of Delight, human lavatories, precursors of the modern public toilet, would wander the streets carrying pails and wearing capacious cloaks with which to shield their customers.

A pious disdain for excessive attention to cleanliness contributed to the poor take-up of farsighted Harington's toilet, the first such device with moving parts, and it would be another 200 years before the water-closet began to take hold. It was then that another Briton, Alexander Cummings, invented an odourless device, subsequently improved upon by his compatriot Joseph Bramah, who niftily hinged the bowl flap to prevent it freezing shut.

Improvements to the design by the 19th-century British trio Thomas Crapper, Thomas Twyford and George Jennings ushered in the golden age of toilets. The latter inventor, triumphing over Victorian prudery but aided by another period novelty, "the excursion", would go on to install outdoor toilets throughout the land. Soon his elegant slate conveniences, with their cast-iron arches, decorative panels and even pergolas, also graced the streets of Paris, Berlin, Hong Kong and Sydney.

These toilet adventurers not only cleaned up public space but also expanded it, freeing citizens to wander without being caught short. For women, such liberation was particularly marked: excluded from simple stand-up pissoirs they would urinate furtively, beneath broad skirts, on the street - when they left the private realm of the home at all. Older public toilets, like many pubs, typically still have twice the provision for men, on the antiquated understanding that it is mainly they who stride the public realm.

Now Labour, perhaps sensing that free toilets mark territory as public, and recognising the extent, hastened by Thatcherism, of their decline, has been increasingly clamorous about their fate. Ministers have been making all the right noises, responding to such statistics as that nearly one in five public toilets has closed in the past three years and that the remainder form a continuum of dereliction.

In a landmark speech to the BTA in 2006, the then minister for local government, Phil Woolas, spoke of the need for "a cultural change in the way we think about this very important issue". "Around the world, 2.6 billion people [lack] adequate sanitation," he said, widening the theme, and "sanitation is dignity". In March, the communities minister, Lady Andrews, invoked dignity and freedom once again - namely, the withdrawal of both from older and disabled people and families with young children deprived of proper access to public toilets. "We need to reverse this decline," she said. The trouble is that ministers then went on to propose a costive dribble of piecemeal "modern solutions".

To frightening automated pods lurking on street corners, night-time pop-up pissoirs (with their curious fantasies of greater female continence) and SatLav, text-messaged directions to the nearest toilet, was added most recently Community Toilet Schemes, according to which local businesses would be paid to let the public relieve themselves. It is a haphazard approach of more or less privatised parts. Changes to the Public Health Act that have already passed through the Lords, removing an anomaly preventing charging for urinals, will only further smooth the path to businesses profiting from our necessity.

Temples of sanitation

Almost perversely ignored by the government is the simple, comprehensive approach of funding a new generation of public toilets, complete with attendants. (Gongfermors, cesspit cleaners, had among the best-paid jobs in medieval England.) Yet Woolas's intention to keep the "legislative option", of forcing councils to provide public toilets, in his "back pocket" remains unchanged - his metaphor in unwitting proximity to the possibly ultimate source of the fiscal tightness pervading Labour policy and unlikely to loosen under Gordon Brown.

Meanwhile, innovation in toilet manufacture has moved to Asia. China spent £20m creating 3,500 "five-star" tourism toilets for the Olympics this year, says the BTA. That country threatens to wrest the cloacal crown from Japan, where even standard models have heated and massaging lids that open automatically, along with the crucial targeted water jets, followed by a blow dry; one toilet plays a Mendelssohn opus. These are the modern equivalents of Victorian Britain's sanitary temples, tempting to use even if you don't need to. Britain, meanwhile, remains perched on a cracked old crock whose seat was probably stolen some time ago.