Piss and Pity: A Disabled Person’s Eternal Search for an Accessible Convenience

In something bordering on the miraculous, though not for religious reasons of any kind, I recently rose from ongoing challenges of poor health to perform a spoken word set in a new Hastings venue.

To my delight, this venue has level access, a spacious entrance, and reasonable lighting. I’d been offered the headline slot by the organiser who had gone to some effort to make the event inclusive, for which I thank him.

The event was packed, the crowd eager. I won’t lie, it was hard, and my slot began at around 9:15pm – a challenge, considering that these days I need to be in bed and ready for sleep by 10pm in order to maintain my health.

The organiser did well, but like many – many, many, in fact – we’re all up against it when we have no money and no easy funding pots to create access, when it comes to the essential need of all human beings to use the toilet.

Call it what you want, and we have a lot of terminology to draw from. As a child, I rather favoured bog, though I remember my grandmother insisting I learn the word lavatory. There was also the garderobe of the medieval era.

Sadly, on my performance night, I was kept off the bog, the lav, or whatever you call it – along with several audience members – because there simply wasn’t one that we could use at the venue.

I knew this in advance and researched some back-ups, which were not that easy to get to. Here’s the crux: non-disabled people seek out a convenience on auto-pilot. Occasionally, I amuse myself with other disabled activists by imagining the outcry and fury that would explode if the use of lavatory facilities was banned or blocked for everyone.

So why is it okay for disabled people to have to live this way?

This is, yet again, a demonstration of the social model of disability – whereby barriers (overwhelmingly removable) create disability.

This brings me to the huge misconception that it’s all about steps and basic available space. Wheelchair users like myself do confront this discrimination head-on. I may find some grit to perform a new poetry set, sacrificing some precious energy for the privilege, but relieving myself is a blunt reality.

Others within the disabled community face barriers that may not be so obvious, yet solutions are likewise often simple. Visually-impaired people appreciate decent light and accessible signage. Those with mobility impairments can have barriers removed by decent grab rails and toilets that are not level with the floor. Those with specific medical conditions may need more room to carry out procedures that require cleanliness and maintain dignity. The irony is this relates to a large number of people across all sections of society.

There’s a bottomless pit of untapped knowledge and lived experience relating to this most human of acts among the disabled community that is rarely called upon. This is before we consider legal compliance and policies relating to the provision of accessible toilets.

I choose to use the term ‘accessible’ pointedly, as the only disabled bogs I know are indeed clearly facing their own barriers. We all have stories of the accessible toilets turned into storage cupboards, the space where the mop and bucket go; not forgetting the time I encountered a mountain of toilet rolls that obliterated all and any space in this supposedly modern accessible privy.

Unsurprisingly, when governments neglect their responsibilities concerning accessible toilets, nightmarish horrors mount up. I’ve confronted neglected loos with turds in the sink. Another time, drug paraphernalia, including used needles thrown into the toilet bowl and left on the seat. We encounter used nappies left on the floor, lack of toilet roll, and incomprehensible and ill-placed handwashing facilities.

I realise such experiences can cut across many communities, and non-disabled people might feel grumpy but they can simply go elsewhere.

The history of accessible toilets has always been a chequered, stenchy, and frustrating one, but key campaign consortium group Changing Places headed significant improvements in accessible toilet provision, which improved earlier, somewhat one-size-fits-all design. At one point, a £30.5million pot existed to which businesses and local authorities could apply. This led to more toilets that were appropriate for a broader range of disabled people and eventually, by 2020, there were “more than 1,400 Changing Places toilets in the UK, compared with 140 in 2007“. The provision of such toilets was made “compulsory for new buildings in England in 2021”, with some limitation.

Progress has slowed since then, and currently, but not surprisingly, funding was withdrawn after the second round of applications for Changing Places toilets in March this year. I doubt it will reappear on the Starmer Government’s agenda.

Being able to fulfil this most human and biological necessity with as much dignity and equity as possible must surely count as a political act. It reminds me of a perhaps apocryphal story I learned during my years as a disability equality trainer, which stated that one argument against women MPs in the late Victorian era was that they would need ‘special’, prohibitively expensive, lavatory facilities. True or not, it’s a reminder of how societal concepts create barriers within any era.

As the current Government is resorting to the ‘work-shy’ rhetoric concerning disabled people, I suspect there will be an extension of such thinking that makes its way right down into limiting how often we have the freedom – the right – to relieve ourselves with the same dignity as everyone else.

Penny Pepper is an award-winning author, poet, and disabled activist