Observations on the World Toilet Summit

British public toilets are "in freefall", laments Richard Chisnell, director of the British Toilet Association. When the World Toilet Summit is held in Belfast in September - the first time it has sat in the UK - it will survey the ruins of a British sanitary scene that was once, according to Chisnell, "the envy of the world". The same penny-pinching mentality that leaves our streets knee-deep in the droppings of the fast-food industry is letting what few public toilets remain fall into dereliction.

In the past five years alone we have lost one-third of our public toilets: the precipitate tail-end of a decades-long decline. Yet, for much of the modern era, Britain was home to the pantheon of toilet heroes. China may recently have discovered a 2,000-year-old royal toilet complete with armrests and running water, but historians agree that the first flushing water closet was the invention of Sir John Harrington, a favourite godson of Elizabeth I, in 1596.

Sir John was before his time: his compatriots, whether from poverty or through pious disdain, stuck to close stools, chamber pots or the services of human lavatories, who would wander the streets carrying pails, and wearing capacious cloaks with which to shield their customers. It would be another 200 years before the water closet began to take hold: Alexander Cummings invented an odourless device, subsequently improved upon by Joseph Bramah, who niftily hinged the bowl flap to prevent it freezing shut.

Improvements by Thomas Crapper, Thomas Twyford and George Jennings ushered in a golden age. Jennings would eventually install the new outdoor toilets throughout Britain, and soon his elegant slate conveniences, with their cast-iron arches, decorative panels and even pergolas, also graced the streets of Paris, Berlin, Hong Kong and Sydney. Jennings's name, it was written in 1882, was known "from Zembla's shores unto the far Peru".

He and his fellow adventurers not only cleaned up public space but also freed citizens from the worry of being caught short. A century on, however, Britain's streets are once again zones of unrelieved anxiety. We are forced into pubs or cafes - to become customers - to spend a penny. Councils have either given up or turned to the private sector to provide automated public conveniences: those grey, coin-operated pods which, even when they are functional, are nothing more.

Jennings once wrote that the civilisation of a people could be measured by its toilets. Typically Victorian, he was a great believer in progress. You can't help wondering whether, were he with us today, he would think there had been any.

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