Tuesday, August 14, 2012

The smallest listed building?

This is, believe it or not, listed. What is hidden behind the board is one of Birmingham's Victorian cast-iron urinals. They were always green for some reason. There are numerous of them around the city, most in the areas of the city centre that would have been both industrial and residential in the nineteenth century. The only one which is still open for use is the one in the suburb of Harborne (perhaps posh people micturate more carefully: I can see that having these old urinals in use leaves them vulnerable to vandalism and they would be fantasically difficult or expensive to repair). That one was closed for many years and then re-opened because the residents wanted it to be. The ones in the city centre went the other way: they were open and in use until the 1990s, then the council gradually closed almost all of its public loos, replaced them with superloos that you have to pay for, and/or handed the care of them over to external companies.
Anyone who reads this young blog with any regularity or attention will not be surprised that I don't think this is the whole story. LGBTQ readers will remember or have heard the stories of how the police used public toilets for sting operations for homosexuals. A particularly pretty or well-endowed officer would make a pass at another man in a toilet and if he showed any interest he would be arrested for importuning (Sex in a public toilet is now a sepcific offense in British law). These sting operations were happening as late as the 1990s at this specific urinal. I heard of one where they let the man finish himself off before they arrested him. One man was so attached to this urinal that when the council closed it permanently he put a bouquet of flowers outside. A rather offbeat fragment of the hidden history of Birmingham!

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