Where they won’t spend a penny

Public loos are rarely the province of the lighting designer except in the more chi-chi establishment. In fact it was a bit of a turn-up when DPA won an award for the Bullring ones a few years back. But nice though it is when someone’s had a stab at something more winning, I’d settle for one fitting over each cubicle. There are a number of criteria (which by and large we won’t go into) for selecting which cubicle we enter, but one of them is whether it has a light.

There doesn’t seem to be any rhyme or reason in the distribution of the fittings in many public toilets (certainly very little photometric calculation), no apparent attempt even at fairness. One person will sit there basking in the full force of a 35W CFL while another languishes in the gloom of a pre-Glasnost Russian cell. (Or probably post-Glasnost come to think of it). Having established that not everyone’s allowed their own light, how do they decide? Do they sit around catapulting Blu-Tack at the ceiling to determine where the fittings will go? Or perhaps they do it on some sort of short straw/long straw system.

I appreciate that budgets often go down the toilet (or not in this case), but how much more does it cost to bung in a couple more fittings or to do the bloody maths to make sure the light is more evenly spread? They’re fond of banging on about the ‘retail experience’, but it literally goes down the pan in the average shopping centre loo.

Maybe this is a girl thing. On the various desperate occasions I have had to resort to the Gents, my general impression has been that they’re even worse than the Ladies on the grounds that boys aren’t as fussy about these things. That certainly applies to the lighting in front of the mirror. Everyone knows that women take so long in the loo because they’re not only answering calls of nature but patching up the damage wrought by too many Chardonnays or a cataclysmic love life.

According to the mirror in the average public lavatory, lurid with cold fluorescent downlighting, you’ve managed to contract a terminal illness somewhere between the bar and the bathroom. You attempt to alleviate this tubercular pallor with copious amounts of blusher and other cosmetic aids, only to emerge as Marcel Marceau.

I know it’s only a small consideration in the great scheme of things, but it’s in that category – along with changing rooms, car parks and back alleyways – of neglected areas, zones of our lives where apparently lighting doesn’t matter a stuff. The real niggle is that it wouldn’t cost that much more money or effort to make it so much better.

Mind you, the really irritating one is the uber-cool bar where they have thought about it, and decided that Stygian gloom would be fun. Black walls, mirrored surfaces and only a couple of night lights to navigate by. Stumbling about in semi-pitch blackness trying to find the door out without the aid of a wayfinding system is not my idea of a good night out.

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