Disgusted of Epsom

In the bad old days, say in the fifties and sixties of the last century, it was understood that the provision of public toilets in this country was pretty grim. Something you had to warn visitors from, say, Canada, about. Since then, things have got a lot better, with people like Wetherspoons and the National Trust doing pretty well.

However, yesterday, at the southwestern corner of Hyde Park, I came across a throw back. You paid 50p to use a facility which was in some, not to say, urgent need of attention from both a plumber and a cleaner. This in one of the most tourist infested spots in London.

Perhaps someone needs to remind the Royal Parks authorities - the toilet illustrated being within what I took to be their perimeter - that tourism is the biggest (honest) earner of foreign currency that we have. Something has to pay for all that stuff from China.

Would the response of those authorities be that all that sort of thing had been outsourced to private contractors a long time ago and it was nothing to do with them, thank you very much?

PS: Hyde Park itself in fine shape, on what was a fine Autumn day. Even the bicycles were not a problem. We learned that the round pond was not very round and in the course of finding out about this, I also found out how to rotate the map on my telephone. Given that Cortana has a penchant for displaying her map with north pointing down, this was something which had been annoying me for some time. A result, but one which also nicely illustrated the rather random and sometimes rather slow way that one learns how to use one's toys in the absence of proper instruction.