July 2026
Snuck a few pics of the public toilets outside the GPO. I’ve always liked the railing, with its open circle tops and wiggly spike thing, and the signs are nice too. But of course the main interest is that they’re old street toilets, built in 1910, something rather unusual. In fact they’re so unusual that they’re listed by Heritage Victoria, which notes it “reflects an important era of sanitary, technological and social reform in the early twentieth century. It is of historical significance as a reflection of an era of public health reform and of municipal responsibility for the provision of such public facilities, and of changing attitudes to public decency, in the early twentieth century.” They’ve listed 3 of the others that have survived too.
I was working at the National Trust in the 90s when we listed them all, and the above ground cast iron urinals too. That stemmed from research into the life of the streets by Dr Andrew-Brown May then at Monash, which highlighted that while urinals for men had been around since the 1870s, the first public toilet for women wasn’t built until 1902 – they usually relied on kindly shop owners before that.
Since then all the underground ones have been sealed up except this one (the Town Hall ones are modern). There’s two here in fact, the men’s is 1910, while the ladies had to wait until 1927 (in matching style). There’s not much to see inside, it’s all 60s/90s tiles, though the ladies has a row of stools at the mirror (not my photos). They might have been nice tiles and timber originally, like the one old pic of the one in Russell Street, but I don’t know. And yes I think you had to literally spend a penny to use some of them, and they sometimes had attendants – certainly the ladies at Eliz Street did once.
Last two pics are one in London that’s become a cafe ! Very last thing is an example of the distaste that toilets can generate, about one in Footscray in the 50s.
Storey of Melbourne 