Gentlemen's public conveniences
The gentlemen's underground toilet in St Giles(left) was built in 1895.
(There was no question in Victorian times of building one for women, and indeed there was outrage in London in 1900 when proposals were put forward for a women's public convenience in Camden Town.)
Jackson's Oxford Journal for 12 October 1895 reads:
Corporation works
An underground convenience has been built near the southern end of St. Giles-street, containing two w.c.'s and four urinals. These are reached by a flight of York stone steps from the surface of the street, and the structure is surrounded by a strong cast-iron railing on York stone base. The fittings are in the best white glazed ware, and the whole of the brickwork is lined internally with white and buff glazed bricks, the floor being of vitrified tiles laid upon concrete. The convenience is roofed with cement concrete carried upon steel girders, with pavement lights, cast-iron ventilators, &c.
In 1998, the city council installed new stainless steel cisterns, toilet pans, and cubicle doors.
The women of Oxford had to wait until the nearby Magdalen Street East underground toilet was built in 1909 as a project for the unemployed by the side of Balliol College (see Oxford Chronicle, 8 October 1909, p. 9) . Mary Leslie, who worked for the Public Health Department in Oxford, describes the disgust felt at this indecency in her memoirs of Oxford:
A very different “novelty” that our Department inaugurated was Sanitary Conveniences for Women. Strange to say, such comforts were open to men, but women were too modest to mention such a need. George Bernard Shaw wrote a pamphlet on this much-required service and about that time Oxford City Council decided to supply the need. Quite an agitation arose when it was announced that the first unmentionable contrivance was to be put, mercifully below ground, under the windows (the side windows) of Balliol. Even one of my sisters, visiting me and being shown with pride my latest boast, turned-away with disgust and called my work “indecent”.