
Public toilets: The design, history and politics of who gets to go
From Anthony Burke's By Design
Published 5/25/2026
‘The sewer is the conscience of the city’, or so the French writer Victor Hugo once claimed. It’s a confronting idea, but a revealing one: the way a society deals with waste can tell us a lot about its values, priorities and politics. And yet our toilet habits are something we’re usually taught to…