What is The Great British Public Toilet Map?

What is The Great British Public Toilet Map?
The Great British Public Toilet Map is a public-participation website showing which councils publish open data about public toilets. We need more councils to do this so that people can easily create maps and apps that help people to find a toilet that is nearby, open, and meets their needs.
We hope that visitors to the site will contact councils to ask that they participate. This will help councils to see the demand and benefits in publishing open data.
What is Open Data?
Open Data is information that is machine-readable information (‘data’) that is free for anyone to use (‘open’). The UK Government wants more data to be available to the public. This would allow individuals, businesses and communities to make useful things that improve public services.
Who made The Map?
The Great British Public Toilet Map is an idea that came out of a research project called TACT3, by Jo-Anne Bichard and Gail Knight. Jo-Anne and Gail work at the Royal College of Art Helen Hamlyn Centre for Design, a centre for people-centered design research.
A consortium of universities have worked on other aspects of TACT3, which looked at ways to help older people to managed continence concerns. It is part of a seven-year research programme called New Dynamics of Ageing, which has been cross-funded by five research councils.
Gail manages The Great British Public Toilet Map. She has a blog called ‘Public Toilets and..‘ and is also on Twitter. The graphic design is by Jo Glover and the web developers are Neontribe.
Why is it just for London?
We thought we would start in a region then expand the map if that went well.
We chose London because there were already a few London councils publishing open data, the Olympics are coming up, and the London Assembly has just written a report about London’s toilets that calls for councils to publish open data about public toilets, which includes a standard format. That report and the standard can be downloaded here.
If our funding is successful we’ll be adding data (or adding contact details to campaign for data), for councils in the West Midlands, Scotland and Wales, before making the site UK-wide.
There’s a toilet missing. How do I add it?
You can’t. Sorry.
What you could do is to ask the relevant council to publish data about all their toilets for us and anyone else to use (or, if they already provide data, to fix their data to include the missing toilet!). Then we will be able to show the toilet.
There are websites where you can add toilets directly. This is called ‘crowd-sourcing’, where the public create the data themselves. Toiletmap.co.uk is a good example.
One challenge with crowd-sourcing is: How do you know how reliable the information is? The public need to modify, correct and validate the information as well. Erroneous entries can be costly – no one likes a closed toilet.
As the councils provide the toilets, they’re in the best position to provide accurate information (in theory!). However, mistakes and omissions still exist. One thing we’d like to do in the future is to let the public assist the councils by adding corrections or improvements to council data. These fixes would be sent back to the councils for the next update.
One site with a lot of crowd-sourced public toilet locations (which others can reuse as ‘open data’) is OpenStreetMap (OSM). This map of the world was created entirely by crowd-sourcing information.
A lot of useful data about toilets (opening hours, accessibility, payment) is missing from OSM. Anyone can edit the map to add this information (including councils!). Hopefully we can also improve our site to use more OSM data in the future, and feed back into their database.
Personally we think the ultimate toilet-finding site would use a combination of open data, crowd-sourcing and individual moderators (for when entries conflict), but we still need the data.
Why is there a Starbucks / Pub / Library listed?
The map only shows toilets that the public are allowed to use. This includes private businesses like Starbucks, pubs or council buildings if they are part of a Community Toilet Scheme.
What is a Community Toilet Scheme?
A Community Toilet Scheme is a scheme run by a council where the council pays a fee to private businesses to allow the public to use their toilets without having to buy anything. Many councils sensibly include their own public buildings, like libraries.
In some areas this includes national chains, like Starbucks. However as these are franchises, the scheme operates on a store-by-store basis. Just because a Starbucks in one part of London, or even one part of a borough, allows the public to use their toilets, that doesn’t mean that others do, unfortunately.
I want to know more!
Please contact us at toiletmap@rca.ac.uk if you wish have questions about public toilets or open data, or wish to find out more.
We have also written an inclusive design guide called Publicly Accessible Toilets aimed at providers (including local authorities), other professionals involved in the provision of publicly accessible toilets (e.g stations, department stores, or shopping centres) and may also be of interest to campaigners or the general public.
Publicly Accessible Toilets: An Inclusive Design Guide can be downloaded as a PDF here. We have hard copies available for free! Please email us if you would like to be sent a copy.
Gail has put together a list of other public toilet-related reports and publications on her blog, ‘Public Toilets and…’.
It would be good if… [such and such]
It would. There are lots of things we’d like the map to do. First we need time, funding, help, and data.
Here are a few:
It’d be good if the map was nationwide;
It would be good if it showed all publicly accessible toilets (like those in Tesco), not just those provided by local authorities;
It would be good if users could add/correct data that is then passed on to the data provider;
It would be good to feed council data to OpenStreetMap, and vice-versa;
It would be good to have a mobile version of the site, or an app;
It would be good to refine the search to only show certain toilets, e.g. ‘wheelchair accessible’, ‘open now’;
It would be good to have more information about each toilet, e.g. step-free, or link to an image from Google StreetView;
It would be good to print a map of an area, with toilet details, for people to keep and use.

If you think of any more please let us know at toiletmap@rca.ac.uk and we’ll add them to this list.
New ideas:
It would be good to colour-code the arrows to show the different types of toilet.
Can I help you?
Yes please!
I work for the council. What can we do to help?
If you have been receiving emails from people asking that you publish public toilet open data, and if you would like to give a public response, then please let us know. We will add it to the ‘updates’ section for your council. That will let more people know what you plan to do and how the data is progressing.
If you need advice on creating or publishing public toilet data then we’re happy to help. A good place to start is the GLA’s guidance and suggested open data standard format for toilet data, or looking at the datasets published by other councils.
Help! Stop emailing me!
We’ve tried our best to reach the right person at the council. If you’d like us to contact a different person, or we’ve made a mistake, please let us know by emailing us at toiletmap@rca.ac.uk.
We already have a Toilet Page / Toilet Map on our council website.
Many councils do, and some of them are excellent. This information is useful to residents.
These maps only show one council’s facilities. Open data allows all the councils’ information to be combined, to create customised maps and applications for finding toilets. These apps are better designed around the individual’s needs.
To use Camden as an example, you can see their public toilet webpage here. You can see their public toilet open data webpage here. Links to other public toilet open data webpages can be found by clicking on a council that publishes data, on the toilet map.
People have, in the past, created public toilet databases by trawling every council’s webpage on toilets. Manually checking information in this way is time-consuming and the information on a council website is not always complete. Once included in the database, there’s no way to know if the information changes, so someone has to keep re-visiting all the council webpages. Also, not all councils have webpages about toilets. Basically, it’s never going to work.
With data, a computer program can regularly reload the data so that any updates are immediately displayed.
The good news is that if you already have a toilet website or map, then you already have the information needed to create the data – location, opening hours, type of facilities provided…
You could also use the data yourselves to power your own maps on the council website. As long as the data is kept up-to-date, everything else will follow.
This does require a little work to set up. We think that if more people know where public toilets are, then the facilities become safer, anti-social behaviour reduces, and the value of the public service goes up.
How do we make toilet data?
There are two things to decide:
What information to provide.
What type of file to provide.
The Greater London Authority’s standard covers ‘essential information’ (things like address, opening hours, wheelchair-accessibility) and other information that would be great to work towards collecting (is there step-free access? Do you need a RADAR key to use it? Do you need to pay?).
Our toilet map currently displays the location, the ‘type’ of toilet (public toilet, automatic public convenience (APC or Superloo), Community toilet scheme.. etc.) opening hours, and whether there is an accessible toilet or baby-changing facility. We hope to display more, but we need the councils to provide more.
In their report, the Greater London Authority (GLA) also provide templates for data as .csv or .xml file types. We think .csv is easier, as anyone can make a .csv file. You simply open your spreadsheet of toilet data in Excel, then click ‘Save as…’ and select the .csv file type. It then needs to be published on the internet so that people can reuse it. It also needs to follow the template so that people can use it easily.
The data displayed by our toilet map has been published as .csv, .kml, .xml, .json … all with different layouts and ways of doing things. This makes life very difficult for us. If you wish to help us out when making your toilet data, then we will imminently publish our own template to follow. However in the long term we are also working towards to GLA’s standard.
Can I use this data?
Yes. Maybe. We’re still writing this section..