Cambridge City Council in the UK has spent nearly £1 million on a new public toilet block that includes squat-style facilities explicitly preferred by some foreign visitors. To make matters worse, they’re asking anyone who chooses to squat and shit in a hole in the ground to pay £1 for the privilege.
This is not progress. It is regression dressed up as inclusivity. Britain invented the modern flushing toilet. Victorian engineers perfected sanitation systems that lifted entire populations out of filth and disease.
Now a Labour-run council in one of the country's most historic university cities has decided that the way forward is to install the very facilities associated with places that never made that leap—or chose not to keep it.
The new block on Silver Street, opposite Queens' College and near the Mathematical Bridge, replaced a flood-prone 1980s facility next to the River Cam. Alongside standard toilets, wheelchair-accessible facilities and baby-changing, the council installed three squat-style flushing toilets.
Cambridge City Council's own statement is clear: these are "preferred by some international visitors."
Council leader Cllr Katie Thornburrow explained the thinking: "As they are located at one of the key entry points to the city for coaches bringing international tourists to spend time in the city, we wanted to provide suitable facilities to meet the demand, with a range of toilets to choose from, including a number of the squat toilets that many international visitors prefer."
The £1 charge is justified as covering cleaning, maintenance and an attendant for six hours a day, while supposedly discouraging misuse.
Thornburrow added: "We also felt it appropriate to ask visitors to support the upkeep of these facilities by paying £1, a practice which is common in many other tourist destinations. The £1 charge will help us to keep the toilets clean without relying on council taxpayers to fund these facilities."
All other public toilets in Cambridge remain free. This one, aimed at coachloads of international arrivals, is the exception.
Residents are not impressed. Heather Boyd, 60, from nearby Orwell, told the BBC: "I certainly think if I'm going to spend £1, I'm not going to squat as well. That is absolutely crazy."
She continued: "I'd much rather they built just a normal set of toilets and charged nothing, than one really slick one and charged a pound." Another visitor summed it up: "I wanted to go spend a penny, and I spent a pound."
Raymond Martin, managing director of the British Toilet Association (yes, that’s real)told GB News: "Cambridge has taken a bit of a leap here…" The leap is not forward.
Squat toilets remain common across large parts of Asia, the Middle East and some other regions. Britain spent centuries moving away from them. Sir John Harington designed an early flushing toilet for Elizabeth I in 1596. In 1775 Alexander Cumming patented the S-bend water seal that stopped sewer gases rising.
Victorian engineers scaled the system into the civilised standard the developed world still uses. Integration once meant newcomers adapting to that standard. The new orthodoxy appears to require the host society to dismantle its own.
Are we really going back to shitting in a hole for the sake of ‘diversity’?
Labour councillor Martin Smart ridiculously claimed the facilities "really enhance the cityscape in this historic and much-visited part of the city" and prioritise "safety, accessibility, and user confidence."
The design includes Mandarin signage and symbols indicating the squat option. Cambridge already has squat toilets at the Central Mosque. Public ones paid for by local taxpayers, and charged to them, are a different matter.
This is not about hygiene arguments or personal preference in private homes. It is about what a society signals when it deliberately installs infrastructure associated with lower standards of development because certain visitors prefer them.
Just because some countries still rely on squat facilities does not mean Britain should dilute its own to make arrivals feel more at home. The reverse is the definition of integration.
The toilets are a small, concrete signifier of a much larger pattern: the steady erosion of the expectation that newcomers adapt to the host country's norms rather than the host country adapting its built environment, public services and cultural expectations downward.
Public toilets across Britain have been closing for years as councils claim they cannot afford them. Suddenly nearly a million pounds appears for a facility that includes features many locals will never use and that requires payment for the privilege. The message is unmistakable. British standards are negotiable when the alternative is making certain ‘international’ visitors more comfortable.
The country that once exported modern sanitation across the globe is now importing the starting point back into its own city centres. That is not hospitality. It is cultural self-abasement.
Britain has no duty to become a third-world convenience for anyone.
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