#53: A Public Inconvenience
Is it any wonder a city whose mascot is a pissing boy has problems dealing with public urination?
I’m Eoghan Walsh, a Brussels-based writer, and this is my newsletter Brussels Notes - short observations about life in Brussels, delivered every week. This week we’re talking toilets - the good, the stinky, and the essential.
What’s the best toilet in Brussels? I was at a Pride-adjacent party in the Warandepark at the weekend when the subject came up. Or, when I brought it up, scrabbling around for newsletter ideas while simultaneously wondering whether there was a public loo somewhere in the park. I’ve written previously about my appreciation for the overwrought iron cages in the cellar at the Greenwich. The facilities at nearby Billie are a little more modest but I enjoy the oversized porcelain urinals. The lavatory portholes at Albert on the roof of the royal library probably have the best view of Brussels, and I always liked the skuzzy atmosphere in the basement at the much-missed En Stoemelings. Canvassing opinion among friends and online I was variously recommended Le Cirio, Brasserie Surrealistes, the Villa Empain, and even the 1980s-era toilets of the marriage hall in Brussels’ Stadhuis.
But these are all wrong. The best toilet in Brussels is an open-air urinal on the northern facade of the city’s St Catherine church. Yes, they are dirty. Yes, they smell. Quite forcefully actually, especially now the weather is warming up. But they are always open, they are always free, and using them means you are quite literally pissing up the side of a church.
But beyond the thrill of indulging your inner anti-clericalist there’s something else that makes these the best toilets in Brussels. They literally do not make them like this anymore. The church urinals are a quirk of public sanitation from a time when Brussels wrestled with serious - often deadly - public health and hygiene crises. They are the last relic of a certain kind of muscular, civic-minded urbanism that once tried to win Brussels’ forever war against public urination. Exactly the kind of pragmatic intervention which it sometimes feels as if contemporary Brussels - struggling to deal with its own overlapping health and sanitation crises - is sorely lacking.
The facilities at the St Catherine church were installed in 1873, right in the middle of what a city history called the Belle-Epoque of the Brussels urinal. For most of its long history, Brusselaars relieved themselves wherever they found themselves. But as the city urbanised and densified in the 1800s, this laissez-faire attitude to public hygiene fed repeated Cholera epidemics. In 1845, in an effort to stem the tide of streets overwhelmed with urine, the city’s politicians agreed to “the establishment of public pissoirs, an inseparable, essential and complementary measure improving the system of sidewalks”. By the 1880s a 220-strong network of urinals, vespasiennes, colonne-pissoirs, and water-closets had developed across the Pentagone. At first, many of these were placed at or near busy locations - markets, main roads, public buildings, and churches. But residents and businesses quickly objected to the stench - one alderman complained in 1848 that the town hall had been turned into one giant urinal - so the city relocated them to more discrete back alleys and dead-end laneways.
A battle between two camps - one advocating service provision, and other pushing for repression in the name of public hygiene - emerged over the direction of the city’s sanitation policies. It was the latter which won out, aided by the gradual spread of indoor plumbing, and by the lewd reputation public toilets had in the popular imagination - associated as they were, historian Jean D’Osta wrote, with “immorality… it is claimed that sexual perverts use urinals to engage in obscene proselytising.” By 1904 their number had dropped to 117, by 1913 to 91, and as of 1945 only 57 public toilets remained.
The number of toilets continued to decline through the 20th century, but the average Brusselaar failed to shake off their habit of going out of doors. If you’ve walked anywhere in Brussels you’ll have probably seen at one point in time small boys pissing against the back wheel of a parked car in the presence of a harried looking parent. Or you might have witnessed women emerge together from a bush in a park pulling down their skirts and scanning their surroundings to see if they’d been spotted.
But today, the city’s website lists only 15 public urinals in the Pentagone. They are part of a wider hodgepodge of free public cubicles, paying public toilets, and a network of private businesses signed up to a city scheme to provide “welcoming” facilities - usually involving a cover charge for non-paying customers. Some of these public toilets are, like at St Catherine or on the Vossenplein, in busy locations. Elsewhere the city has recently installed several “uritrottoirs” - standalone urinals with an integrated plant box that is watered by its users - but like their predecessors have largely sprinkled these on quiet side streets off of Rue Neuve or in the dead space between central station and the Place d’Espagne.
Anyone walking through Brussels on a hot summer day will tell you they are insufficient. These days the city’s public toilets are less likely to host sexual perverts than they are to be subject vandalism and theft, to act as makeshift shelters for people sleeping rough, as safe spaces for drug users to inject, and even - according to research published by the Brussels Studies Institute (BIS) - as clandestine weapons depots. A cursory tour of the inner-city installation demonstrates how uninviting or inaccessible many of these are - often broken and frequently dirty, with overflowing bowls and excrement on the floor. The state of the toilets in the Bourse - opened in the building’s basement after an expensive, and extensive refit of the whole site, but already filthy and frequently broken - is damning evidence of the city’s inability to provide for one of the most basic functions of its citizens.
All the more so when you consider that we’re mostly talking about facilities for only one half of the city’s population. Women have always been neglected when it comes to the provision of free and safe public facilities; of those 220 public toilets built in the city’s heyday, only one was accessible to women, and while those numbers have since improved, a local Green politician recently claimed only 30% of the city’s toilets were accessible for women, and that the ratio of urinals to toilets was two to one. When I asked my wife what her favourite toilet in Brussels was, she said she used to always go to the basement WC in the Sint Goriks market because it was the only downtown place that was buggy accessible and where she could change a nappy and use the toilets without having to pay.
It’s not as if the Brussels government is universally incapable of strategic urban interventions; it has an excellent network of public water fountains, and does a good job of promoting them in the hot summer months. And there are options - as outlined by the BIS - to improve the situation. The problem is they cost money and political capital. There could be increased surveillance, but do the police have the resources? Or better street lighting to deter unwanted activities, but is there a budget for maintenance when things break down? Robo-toilets that clean themselves are an option, but they are expensive. Deploying a legion of madame pipis across town to guard toilets is impractical and would expose them to a seriously unsafe working environment.
The city looks no less capable of resolving its public urination problem than it did 150 years ago. In fact, compared to their Belle-Epoque predecessors, it seems even less able to deal with it. Public toilets appear to be just another victim of the city’s compound crises of homelessness, drug use, and chronic underfunding. There is no one standing up for - and upwind of - solutions like the St Catherine urinals. Quite the opposite. Just at the moment when we need a matter-of-fact, less prudish attitude to public sanitation, one which deals with Brussels as it is rather than as it exists in the mind of some of its leaders, and which meets people where they are, the mood is trending towards repression and emphasising personal responsibility. In 2019 a local Christian Democrat politician called for the removal of the “shocking” and “disrespectful” St Catherine urinals, and the following year a petition was launched that claimed the urinals “offend basic civil rights and values of civilisation”.
This attitude baffles me. I cannot think of anything more fundamental than the basic right to human dignity, and nothing more civilised than a city making sure this is a right that all of its residents are able to exercise. The best toilet is the one that’s there when you need it.
Miscellaneous Notes
Alright, give it to me - what are you best toilet recommendations in Brussels?
As an aside, this was the first time I “did” Pride, and it was great! I should go more often, such a great atmosphere downtown.
Sneak preview/self-promotion: I will have a feature in the 2nd edition of Le Fooding magazine, which you can pre-order here!