Building Profile

Public Toilet,
Gravesend
David Littlefield describes
how a small-scale urban
project for the Thames Estuary
town of Gravesend provided
Plastik Architects with one of
their first major commissions;
and the town with a truly iconic
public convenience.

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Is there such a thing as ‘virgin territory’, a landscape so
devoid of reference points that there is nothing worth
translating into an architectural language? There is always,
surely, some redeeming quality about a place (a shape, a
history, even plain old-fashioned context) one can grab hold of
and amplify, or use as a starting point for a design journey.
John Davies, a director of Plastik Architects, had always
assumed that architects could hunt, like detectives, for clues
from which a design solution could spring. That was until he
found himself designing a public toilet in Gravesend.
The long elevation of the building; from this angle, the purpose of the structure is unknowable.
Site plan showing the public toilet as an event between the open space of the
car park to the north, and buildings to the south. ‘This was about giving
something to the town, rather than pushing some sort of personal agenda,’
says John Davies of Plastik Architects.
Gravesend is not, in fact, as dead-end a place as its name
suggests. Forty-five minutes east from London Bridge railway
station – past Woolwich, past Bexley, past Dartford –
Gravesend lies in the scruffy urban nothingness that is north
Kent. With medieval roots (and the place where Pocahontas
died), this estuarine town is not unloved – just knocked
about a bit and subject to piecemeal developments that add
up to very little. However, the local authority has a certain
ambition for the place and has demolished a couple of
multistorey car parks to make way for a Penoyre & Prasad
Plastik Architects, Public Toilet, Gravesend, Kent, 2007
The toilets were conceived as a consciously angular piece of public art – a
design move that emerged from the triangular site.
master plan. Some smart housing is going up and the town
centre looks like it might benefit from a dose of
predetermined order in lieu of an accumulation of second-
rate bits and bobs. Which is where the toilets come in.
The newly emerging street plan for this quarter of
Gravesend seemed to suggest what Davies described as a
‘node point’, a position within the master plan that cried out
for something (anything) to act as a landmark, a beacon, an
urban punctuation mark. As the public loo had disappeared
with one of the car parks, a new facility seemed like a good
idea. The local authority even set aside £300,000 for the project.
Originally, the contract went to Penoyre & Prasad, falling
within the remit of one of their senior architects, Richard
Owers. But when Owers decided to leave the practice and
take up a directorship at the brand-new firm of Plastik
Architects, he asked if he could take the loo project with
him. His former bosses obliged, and Plastik found
themselves with one of their first jobs.
The finished product is a curious affair, and one that is
atypical of everything else that Plastik have produced since
setting up four years ago. Which comes down to this matter
of virgin territory. There is no contemporary archetype for the
public toilet, other than that they are often ‘pretty dark and
pretty smelly,’ says Davies, who also describes the site as
‘dreary’. With a grade-level car park on one side and a row of
unremarkable shops on the other (no less than five places to
get your hair cut, a pub, a Chinese takeaway and an Afro-
Caribbean café), there was nothing in the immediate vicinity
that Plastik felt deserved anything like a poetic response.
But there was one thing that provided a prompt for a
creative move – the slab of new pavement on which this little
pavilion sits is triangular. Plastik, having at last found
something to cling on to, exploited this happy accident for all
it was worth. The result is a freeform piece of public art, all
angles and asymmetry; a structure that is deliberately self-
referential and even a little alien.
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The concrete roof is given an edge detail that creates a line of shadow, reinforcing the
angularity of the structure – a detail inspired by the work of Carlo Scarpa.
The building sits like a heavy-duty trireme, a concrete and
ceramic wedge idling in a sea of paving slabs. But it is delightful.
On a sunny day last October, the toilet attendant, an elderly
man called Robert, was mopping the floor in a very business-
like manner and cheerfully telling anyone who cared to listen
that the building had, he thought, won Toilet of the Year.
The fundamental constructional/conceptual idea driving
this building is that of a floating canopy, hovering above the
walls to admit light into what is otherwise (almost) a
windowless structure. Four load-bearing walls (picked out in
primary colours) support the inverted pyramid of a roof, the
underside of which is washed dramatically in light. The
building was imagined more as a set of simple surfaces
assembled with the minimum amount of detail, and it was a
strategy that almost worked.
Davies and Owers briefly considered omitting the perimeter
walls in favour of treating the facility as ‘a settlement of cubicles
sitting under a protective sculptural roof’ defined by the
structural walls alone. This would have eliminated the need for
ventilation, but the client considered this arrangement to be
difficult to manage and maintain. The whole ensemble therefore
came to be enclosed within a heavyweight, faceted wall upon
which the roof sits via a ‘brittle glazed strip’ that zigzags its way
around the building above head height. The glass and its
framing material sit within slots cast into the concrete
structure. This detailing has not been terribly well executed and,
worse, retrofitted lighting units look exactly that – an
afterthought (not by the architects). However, considering the
project came to be about ‘the extent to which a public toilet can
become a piece of public sculpture,’ as Davies says, Plastik has
managed to pull off an idea with few compromises.
That said, this public toilet is the most alluring architectural
object for a very long time. Outside, its appearance changes
radically with even a slight change of one’s viewpoint, while
randomly spaced glass tiles catch the light intermittently like
cat’s-eyes or sequins. Inside, the brightly coloured concrete, the
three-dimensional angularity (like a set for a German
Expressionist film), the grooves that emphasise the folds of the
roof, all combine to create a place that makes you want to
linger for far longer than is seemly in a building of this type.
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Interior of the Gravesend toilet, showing the pink-edged skylight and the
blue figures indicating the direction of the male and female facilities.
This little building is constructed of few materials and colours. Yellow is
glimpsed through the entrance; once inside, there is blue, pink and orange.
A retrofitted lighting installation, which disturbs the clarity of the
concrete edges during the daytime, at night emphasises dramatically
the angular cut between the facades.
Short section through the building. The roof slab reduces to 200 millimetres
(7.9 inches) – about as thin as the engineer would allow.
3-D model showing the handful of construction elements:
floor slab, load-bearing walls, facades and roof.
Gravesend’s public toilet is a piece of whimsy. And why
not? It is generous also: with three cubicles for women and
three for men (plus urinals), little offices for two attendants
and a storeroom. There can be few public facilities boasting
such largesse.
Certainly, the locals seem to like it – although the building
bears the scuffs of skateboarders’ attentions, it has attracted
little or no graffiti. Soon after the building first opened, council
officials observed two old ladies pause, uncertainly, before
entering; when they exited shortly afterwards, they were
giggling. If the giggles were down to the virtues of the building
alone, Plastik have done their work very well indeed. 4+
David Littlefield is an architectural writer. He has written and edited a number
of books, including Architectural Voices: Listening to Old Buildings, published
by Wiley in October 2007. He is also curating the exhibition ‘Unseen Hands:
100 Years of Structural Engineering’ which will run at the Victoria & Albert
Museum from March to October 2008. He has taught at Chelsea College of
Art & Design and the University of Bath.
Text © 2008 John Wiley & Sons Ltd. Images © Plastik Architects, photos
Robin Hayes Photography
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