This is one of the toughest decisions I've faced recently.
Left or right?
This is the entrance to the public conveniences under the Fulham Broadway Retail Centre.
I got it right in a couple of seconds, after I'd thought "what the hell are those?" and "why have they drawn an ice lolly?" and "hang on one of these must be male" and "oh I see what they did there" and "what a bloody stupid pair of symbols", and I turned right.
I should point out that I'm not in the habit of photographing public conveniences. But the toilets at Fulham were very quiet, and I made sure nobody was coming in or out, and I didn't have to hang around waiting because they really were very quiet, and this is the outside of the toilets anyway, and the same will also be the case during the remainder of this post, because rest assured I'm not in the habit of photographing public conveniences.
I mulled it over afterwards and tried to decide why the symbols were so difficult to decode. It might have been that the differential had been reduced to an absolute minimum. It might have been the lack of a head, because a head would have made the symbols look more human. It might have been the fact that each symbol only had one leg, aligned centrally where nobody has a leg. It was probably all of these, but mainly the fact that the designer had prioritised cleverness over clarity.
This is the entrance to the new toilets at Ealing Broadway station.
These are the standard pictograms for toilets - if you see this pair you know exactly what's being pointed towards. Each has a head and two legs, which definitely helps. That said, they differ only in that one has a 'skirt' and one doesn't, which is exactly the same single difference as at Fulham Broadway. Through years of familiarity we've been hardwired to associate the correct door with whether or not the symbol has a skirt, despite many women not wearing them, and certainly not skirts that short, and what's to stop anyone wearing or not wearing a skirt these days anyway.
They're not brilliant symbols but they work.
These are the public conveniences on Botwell Road in Hayes. They're a lot older, indeed quite primitive, but a welcome leftover from the days when local councils provided public conveniences as a matter of course.
They also display the usual pictograms on light fittings by the entrances, one with a skirt and one without. But these are quite small and quite distant from the pavement where you have to make your decision, so I imagine many with poor sight might accidentally go the wrong way if this were all that was provided.
Thankfully the good folk who designed these conveniences looked ahead at this possibility and also wrote the name in words. The sign above this gate says Ladies and the sign to the right, out of shot, says Gentlemen. The ironwork looks old enough that it might have been Hayes and Harlington Urban District Council who first did this, and I thank them for their common sense. I cannot get 'Ladies' and 'Gentlemen' wrong, it's much better than relying on symbols.
That said I did once make a total mess of going into the correct toilet at a museum in Paris. I don't have a photo of it, not least because I was utterly mortified.
The words on those doors were in French so didn't immediately register in my brain. I'm not inept at French, I got an 'A 'in it and I know the French words for Ladies and Gentlemen. But I don't think they used those words, they used something unfamiliar, and because French is only my second language I walked into the wrong one. Words on toilets aren't actually the slamdunk we might think they are, not if they're words you don't recognise.
Some pubs are awful at naming toilets in a readily identifiable way. For a laugh they write 'Cocks' and 'Hens', or 'Stags' and 'Hinds', or 'Sausage' and 'Eggs, or far far worse. And whilst it may be a hilarious talking point the last thing you want to find when you're half-inebriated and dying for a wee is a word puzzle leading to salvation or embarrassment.
These are the toilets above The Mall in Walthamstow.
They too are using words but very annoying words, namely Womens and Mens without apostrophes, which must be enough to make grammar pedants pause for breath and perhaps refuse to enter. Then above this they've used a symbol for the disabled toilet and nappy change area, combining the two so it looks like an amusement arcade grab machine. Words for one and symbols for the other is not the way to go, especially when both are entirely non-standard.
The perfect toilet identifier uses proper words and proper symbols, one to nail for certain which is which and the other for the benefit of those who can't read the words. Proper words that make it clear whether you're about to face urinals or just cubicles, and proper symbols that don't leave you second guessing whether you're about to enter the wrong one. We need fewer jokes and fewer minimalist graphics, and indeed probably more toilets.
When I'm walking towards the divide at a set of public conveniences, all I want is for it not to be ambiguous which way to go. Sort it out, public realm designers.
