When you can no longer spend a penny …….

Now I understand why over the last two decades, public lavatories have vanished from our streets and squares.

2014

Faced with enormous pressures to save money in the face of revenue cuts from central government, many local authorities have closed their public conveniences and redirected the money to front line services.

This I know, but as someone who longer ago parted company with a strong bladder it makes for uncomfortable problems. 

Seven years ago, Andy Robertson chronicled the closure of some of these vital bits of street furniture, and last week he was back with the one on Withington Road, opposite the former Whalley Hotel.

It was not the most attractive of buildings, but it did the biz.  

2021

For a while it was an office/show room, and now is Divine Wellness, serving vegetarian and vegan food, with heaps of good reviews.  You can dine in or drive by to pick up and has its own Facebook page.

So to mangle that biblical quotation from Judges that “out of the strong came something sweet” you could say out of a basic necessary has come something exciting. *

And there will be some who remember when the site, stretching from the corner of Moss Lane West along Withington Road was a strip of shops and houses.

1960

I don’t, but I do remember drinking in the Whalley Hotel and visiting a fine example of a Victorian urinal, which is but maybe now was in Birmingham.

Leaving me just to finish with that old and well-known piece of lavatorial graffiti, “Here I sit broken hearted, spent a penny and only farted”, for no other reason than for sixty years it has brought a smile to my face.

Only surpassed by "you have to kiss a lot of toads till you meet your Prince Charming" and often written on the bottom of the inside door, "beware limbo dancers"

1983

Pictures;  the change of use, 2014, & 2021, from the collection of Andy Robertson, and The Whalley Hotel, Whalley Range, Upper Chorlton Road, 1960, A.H.Downes, m40816,courtesy of Manchester Libraries, Information and Archives, Manchester City Council, http://images.manchester.gov.uk/index.php?session=pass and a Birmingham urinal, 1983 from the collection of Andrew Simpson

*Public lavatories of Manchester and Salford, https://chorltonhistory.blogspot.com/search/label/Public%20lavatories%20of%20Manchester%20and%20Salford

**Judges 14:14