From 1979 to 1996, Phil Polglaze photographed London’s public toilets to aid the legal defence in ‘cottaging’ cases. These newly surfaced, unseen images are records of a political climate in which homosexuality was prosecuted and illicit sex between men a risky thrill.
Phil Polglaze with his Pentax camera, March 2023.
"This is a piece of history you can’t deny,” says Phil Polglaze, who spent much of 20 years documenting London’s public lavatories — grubby places in busy locations such as parks, department stores, tube and railway stations, where gay men were arrested for ‘soliciting’, ‘importuning’ or engaging in sex acts. Homosexuality had been partly decriminalised by the Sexual Offences Act of 1967, but anti-gay legislation and the AIDS crisis meant that many gay men remained closeted. Illicit sex, often in public places, was thus a necessary (and exciting) but also risky way to meet others in fleeting, casual encounters. If caught, one risked a charge of gross indecency or ‘buggery’, punishable by imprisonment. In the decades after 1967, as many as 15,000 gay men are estimated to have been convicted of such charges.
The term ‘cottaging’ refers to cruising or engaging in casual sex in public toilets, and is most often — but not exclusively — associated with gay men. It comes from a Victorian-era use of the word ‘cottage’ to describe small public toilet blocks in Britain (also sometimes dubbed ‘tea-rooms’), which were popular places for a quick thrill.
Photographer Phil Polglaze’s trajectory into the hidden life of ‘cottages’ is a somewhat unexpected one. In 1974, he was working as a geography teacher at a South London school. Already a keen amateur photographer, he used the school’s darkroom to teach himself how to print pictures. The London borough of Southwark then employed him as a photographer through the 1980s and ’90s. But in 1979, Polglaze was approached by a lawyer friend who needed an unusual set of pictures taken.
The lawyer was working on a ‘cottaging’ case, and the argument in defence of his client depended on the demonstration of a certain sightline in a North London public toilet. Unable to bring the judge and jury down to such an ignoble location, he needed to rely on photographic evidence. Polglaze was asked to do the job, and so began a 20-year occupation during which he visited and photographed the scene of alleged crimes (not only of ‘cottaging’ cases but also robbery, arson, murder, rape and road accidents) — always on behalf of the defending party.
As a heterosexual geography teacher with a love for motorbikes, Polglaze was an unlikely advocate for the cause. But that first commission brought in good money — “with all those prints at the end of the first case, I ended up with £280, which back in 1979 was quite a decent fee” — so he continued to do it. Typically, it was the police who took visual records of a crime scene, and those pictures were used in the investigation. Polglaze would be brought on much later, and often he would be given both the prosecution and defence statements to work with, in the hope of creating visual evidence that might exonerate the client.
"I had a much greater understanding of the crime compared to the bloke who photographed the blood on the wall, ” he says. “I could work out through years of experience and mathematics and physics and stuff what [camera] they were using, and I was thinking: is that the truth?”
Between 1979 and 1996, Polglaze applied himself “with common sense and honesty, of course” to the task of interpreting the language of legal documents and turning that into imagery that would support the defendant. The ‘bog jobs’, as he calls his photographs of ‘cottages’, were among the less gruesome assignments he received, although much was at stake for the men accused: “For some people it ruined their lives. Some were guilty, yes; some were innocent, yes. But don’t forget these stories were printed in the local newspapers. I was honest, as much as I could be, for these poor blokes.”
Over the years, Polglaze documented more than 50 public toilets across London, from Battersea to Blackheath and Kingston to Greenwich. He realised how easy police were finding it to ‘nick’ and prosecute men for homosexual activity, often by employing ‘pretty police’ in plain clothes to set up gay men, or by using dubious espionage tactics. Polglaze (now in his 70s) remembers a lavatory near Wembley, where in 1984, police entrapped and arrested 400 men over a month by hiding in the roof and drilling holes in the ceiling to observe the toilets below. Polglaze’s pictures show where the police climbed up and the rubbish they left behind.
“Men would turn up, the coppers would nick ’em, they would plead either guilty to get it done and dusted, or they would plead not guilty. If you pleaded not guilty, you are rolling the dice…. But there were some fantastic firms of solicitors who really worked over and above for their clients,” he explains.
In the early 1980s, Polglaze was doing four or five ‘bog jobs’ a week, an indication of quite how much police activity was directed towards catching gay men and a reflection of the political climate. His purpose was always to prove what could or could not have been seen by the police or a witness from a certain angle. It was all about the lines of sight. In a September 2005 interview with the Gay Times — the only place in which some of these photographs were ever published — he said: “My job as a photographer was to assess the structure of the place and establish sightlines. It was a way of establishing facts without taking juries to the location, which would’ve been unthinkable. You have to be neutral, you can’t bend the truth in order to get someone off. But you can establish sightlines: could a policeman genuinely have seen an erect penis from such-and-such an angle? Could sex really have taken place through this glory hole, or under this cubicle partition?”
Sometimes the photographs helped to get the defendant free, at other times visual evidence of the toilets was more likely to work against them. Sexually explicit graffiti, for example, was a recurring challenge for Polglaze, and a giveaway of what really went down in the toilets. “It is easier to put things into pictures than to take them out,” he says. “For instance, there were some toilets with ‘meet me big boy tonight’ or ‘here’s my phone number I’ll show you a good time’ [scribbled on the wall] … If you include that in a photograph, would you be influencing a jury? So you just bring the angle down a bit. Your brain fills in the rest but you don’t see it.”
Polglaze remembers the ‘Case of the Norwegian Sailor’ in Kingston in 1990. A Norwegian seaman had been caught on charges of performing a sex act, which involved him reaching his arm under the partition between two cubicles. Polglaze went along to the lavatory with the barrister, the solicitor and the solicitor’s clerk, where they restaged the suspected event. In the resulting photographs, the clerk can be seen laying on the floor, sticking his arm under the wall. The point was to demonstrate that the sailor could never have reached far enough to achieve what he was accused of. But once in the courtroom, the barrister told his client not to move, just to sit very still. He was found not guilty, Polglaze chuckles, but “the humour is that when the defendant left the box, he had the longest arms you have ever seen in your life!”
Urinal from the former Holborn Underground Public Conveniences (ID no.: 80.160)
Polglaze's ‘bog jobs’ came to an end when Legal Aid was cut for ‘cottaging’ cases and the struggle for gay rights gained ground in the 1990s, changing the culture and necessity of illicit sex. Many of the public toilets photographed by Polglaze have since disappeared: knocked down, boarded up, or even converted into flats or cafes. Some of them were architecturally interesting spaces with beautiful ceramic urinals and hand basins, ironwork or decorative fittings.
The museum keeps two urinals from the former Holborn Underground Public Conveniences, which closed in 1980, and a 1937 guide to public lavatories in London by Thomas Burke, titled For Your Convenience, which served as a thinly veiled guide to ‘cottaging’ spots around the capital long before these photographs were taken. The 92 prints and contact sheets by Phil Polglaze that now form part of our collection will continue to tell the story of public toilets as popular spots for secret encounters among gay men; a social history that has largely remained hidden from sight.
Header image: Balham, 1986. A Victorian toilet block with ceramic urinals.(©Phil Polglaze; ID no.: 2022.24)
