No indoor toilet?


Sorry if this question seems dumb, but the scene where Maurice visits Cynthia at her home he goes outside to use the toilet in that really small outhouse. Why did he go outside to use the toilet? Doesn't Cynthia and Roxanne have a toilet inside their house?

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The answer is no, there would be no toilet, or indeed a bathroom in the house. The terraced houses that make up much of the older housing stock in British cities were not built with inside toilets — the toilet was either attached to the back of the house, or built separately in the garden. People would tend to wash at the kitchen sink, use a hip bath, and/or go to the local public bath house.

Many of these houses remain, but most have had a room converted into a bathroom.

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On Coronation Street, some of the attached houses have outside toilets...But, they still have inside facilities so I think the outside 'bogs' are a throw-back from earlier times and they were just left in tact.

‘Six inches is perfectly adequate; more is vulgar!' (Prime of Miss Jean Brodie Re: An open window).

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Believe it or not, there are a lot of houses in Britain with the toilet out in the back.
Britain and its hospitals have been left back in Victorian times.



If it harms none, do what thou wilt.

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[deleted]

Even houses that were built with outdoor toilets would have had indoor ones added long ago. they might keep the outdoor one as well, it would be handy if someone else was using the indoor one. And no hospital that I know of has outdoor toilets.

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Most such houses would long since have had indoor toilets and bathrooms added. i don't think anyone was using hip baths in the 1990s.

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Despite some other respeonses, while still possible, it would have been very uncommon to find a house of that type without any indoor toilet by 1996, when the film was made. As Blondfashionisto says, though, in some cases the "outside" toilet may still exist in working order, even if there was one indoors. An old house my grandmother moved into in the 1970s had two indoor toilets (one downstairs, one upstairs in the bathroom), but the original outside one still existed at the back of the house. It was actually handy if one was gardening, or otherwise in the garden.

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Were these pit toilets or flush toilets?






Some things you just can't ride around...

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Flush toilets certainly. As the previous poster says, you'd be unlikely to find an outdoor toilet now, and least of all in a council house in London as councils made concerted efforts in the 1970-1980s to convert all their stock to indoor facilities due to public health concerns. That doesn't mean that the outside toilet was always removed, but even when you find an outdoor one, there'll be an indoor one as well.

The scene where Timothy Spall uses the outdoor toilet jarred with me a little at first, but as he was visiting his old home it seemed likely he'd head for the place he knew and was used to. My nan's home in Camden Town had an outside toilet until the 1980s and if I visited it now and the option was still there I'd probably want to use it, just for old times sake :-)

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I have visited houses in London just last year that had an outdoor toilet.

It's that man again!!

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very unlikely in the 1990s that the house wouldn't have an indoor toilet. some houses would still have the old outdoor ones as well though, if they had been built with them originally.

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A thunderbox out in the back yard.

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