Why Britain’s public conveniences are anything but

ANTOINETTE, A ROUGH sleeper in the Finsbury Park area of north London, doesn’t feel safe going to the toilet. The one public toilet nearby is often dirty, she says, and people take drugs in there. A pub near the underground station allows non-customers in, but men use it for another kind of relief. She prefers a branch of Costa, a coffee chain, but the door requires a passcode that is handed out only to customers. So she relies on friendly baristas slipping her the code.

A guerrilla Twitter campaign called London Loo Codes aims to help. It collects and distributes codes for toilets across London, to allow more people to “pee for free”. It has collated a list of more than 175 facilities in the capital, including ones that are already unlocked. The initiative has trickled down to other cities, including Edinburgh, Sheffield and Oxford.