The Handrail Test: A 2026 Walking Audit of the Town's Public Toilets
Photo: CEphoto, Uwe Aranas, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons
There is a particular kind of walk you can only do with a notebook in one hand and a quiet sense of urgency in the other. Ours started at the bus station at ten past nine on a grey Saturday, and it ended four hours later outside the leisure centre with a tally of five public conveniences, two locked doors, one broken hand dryer and a fairly firm opinion about handrails.
We were auditing the town's loos. Not because it is glamorous, but because they are the most quietly load-bearing buildings we have. A public toilet is where a carer's day either works or falls apart. It is where a coach party decides whether to come back. It is where an eighty-two-year-old decides whether to risk the walk into town at all. You can measure a high street's friendliness in coffee shops, but the truer test is whether there is somewhere decent to go when the coffee has done its work.
Why loos belong in the heritage conversation
We are a site that likes old signs, boundary markers and the letters above the shops — and we think public conveniences belong in that same quiet category of civic furniture. The Victorian and Edwardian urge to build public amenities for public health produced some genuinely lovely buildings: glazed brick, cast-iron cisterns, mosaic floors, the odd bit of stone lettering. Some of ours have been sold off, some are now cafés, and one is a storage unit for a hardware shop.
But heritage is not only about what we keep. It is about what we still provide. A town that keeps a clean, accessible, clearly signed loo open in 2026 is making a statement about who it thinks belongs in public space. That is a civic value, not a nostalgia trip.
The audit: five stops, one town
We deliberately walked it as a visitor would, without a car, starting where the buses stop and following the signage rather than our phones.
| Stop | Hours (as posted) | Cost | Notes |
|---|---|---|---|
| Bus station block | 7am–7pm, daily | 20p, attendant on weekdays | Attendant present, spotless, no baby change |
| Market square block | 8am–6pm, daily | Free, Radar key for accessible cubicle | Two steps down to the door, signage round the corner |
| Recreation ground pavilion | 9am–dusk, April–October | Free | Closed in winter, no accessible cubicle |
| Library | During library hours | Free | Excellent, but the queue is the borrowing queue |
| Leisure centre | 6.30am–10pm | Free to enter, no purchase needed | Fully accessible, Changing Places facility, handrails both sides |
The gaps are the story. Two of the five are only reliably usable inside someone else's opening hours. One is seasonal. The accessible option with the proper hoist and the space for a wheelchair is at the far end of town, which is fine if you drive and less fine if you do not. And the signage, in three places out of five, points you at a spot that is technically correct but practically confusing.
None of this is scandalous. It is just the ordinary, fixable friction that decides whether a place feels welcoming or merely polite.
The people behind the doors
We caught up with a cleaner who has looked after the market square block for the better part of two decades. She works alone, starts before the shops open, and has a mental list of regulars she keeps an eye on — the man with the walking frame, the two mums who meet on Tuesdays, the coach driver who always says thank you.
“People think it's a nothing job,” she said, wringing out a cloth. “But if I'm not here, people notice by ten o'clock.”
A local councillor we spoke to was candid about the arithmetic. Cleaning, maintenance, staffing and insurance run to a five-figure sum per site per year, and every budget round puts the item under pressure. “Nobody ever writes in to praise a toilet,” they said, “and everybody writes in when one shuts. We know that. It is still hard to argue for when the numbers are on the table.”
And then there are the campaigners — in this case a mother of a disabled teenager who has spent the past three years politely, persistently mapping which doors in town she can get her son through. Her verdict was the one that stuck with us: “A Changing Places loo isn't a bonus. It's the difference between a day out and staying home.”
What a closure actually costs
It is easy to file a closure under “savings” and move on. The costs simply turn up somewhere else.
- Older residents start rationing their outings. There is a well-documented “loo leash” effect where people plan their whole week around a reliable stop.
- Carers lose the one place they can safely help someone without an argument or an apology.
- Parents end up changing a baby on a café floor and buying a coffee they did not want, which is fine — until the café stops being welcoming about it.
- Visitors and coach parties quietly take their spending to the next town with the nice, obvious, open facilities.
- Volunteers pick up the slack. We heard repeatedly about church halls and community rooms opening their doors as informal public conveniences. Kindness is not a substitute for provision.
Small fixes, real dignity
The encouraging thing is that most of this is not a rebuild. It is a checklist. On our walk we saw what worked and what did not, and the difference was often under fifty quid.
What good looked like: handrails on both sides, a hook low enough to use, a mirror people can actually see themselves in, bright lighting, a shelf, a bin, and a sign that tells you where you are and what time it shuts.
What let it down: doors that need two hands and a hip, opening times published only on a laminated sheet inside the building (which is shut), accessible cubicles used as storage, and the phrase “out of order” with no date on it.
Simple things any council could do this year: publish accurate opening hours on mapping apps and the council website; join the Radar key scheme and advertise it; put free period products in at least one cubicle; make sure the men's has a baby change; keep a maintenance log that is visible to the public; and stop calling it “Public Conveniences” on the sign if the actual sign says nothing at all.
The handrail test
We have a small test we now apply to any public building in town, and we would recommend it to anyone involved in decisions about the high street. Stand in the doorway of the loo. Ask yourself: could my grandmother use this unaided? Could a carer with a wheelchair and a bag manage it? Could a parent with a toddler and a pushchair get in, turn around and get out without a scene?
If the answer is yes, you have built something quietly brilliant. If it is no, you know exactly what to fix next.
Public toilets are not the most glamorous item in the heritage file. But they are among the most honest. They tell you, plainly, what a place expects of its people and what it is prepared to give back. We came away from our walk more appreciative of the staff who keep them, more understanding of the budgets that constrain them, and more convinced than ever that a town's dignity is measured, in part, by how easy it is to find a decent loo and how safe it feels once you are inside.
If you are heading into town this weekend, the market square block is the one to aim for. Take twenty pence for the bus station, mind the steps, and say hello to the cleaner. She has been holding the place together longer than most of the shop signs.
