E-Books →A Spotter's Guide to Toilets

As any experienced traveller knows, you can tell a whole lot about a place by its bathrooms. Whatever you prefer to call them - lavatory, loo, bog, khasi, thunderbox, dunny, bathroom, restroom, washroom or water closet - toilets are a (sometimes opaque, often wide-open) window into the secret soul of a destination.
It's not just how well they're looked after that's revealing, but where they are positioned and the way they've been conceptualised, designed and decorated. Toilets so often transcend their primary function of being a convenience to become a work of art in their own right, or to make a cultural statement about the priorities, traditions and values of the venues, locations and communities they serve.
The lavatory is a great leveller - everyone feels the call of nature, every day - but being ubiquitous doesn't make it uniform. Around the planet (and beyond it, see page 12), toilets have followed various evolution(more...)