{"id":1445,"date":"2009-06-11T10:22:07","date_gmt":"2009-06-11T09:22:07","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/wordpress\/?p=1445"},"modified":"2009-06-11T10:22:07","modified_gmt":"2009-06-11T09:22:07","slug":"whats-the-most-expensive-public-toilet-in-the-world","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/?p=1445","title":{"rendered":"What&#8217;s the most expensive public toilet in the world?"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Some time ago I blogged about <a href=\"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/2008\/12\/whats_the_most_expensive_cup_o.html\">the most expensive cup of coffee in the world<\/a>. Today I have a new concern: the most expensive public toilet in the world.<br \/>\nNow, of course, many toilets are free to use. But charging for women started with the addition of locks in the UK and gave rise to the expression <a href=\"http:\/\/www.phrases.org.uk\/meanings\/spend-a-penny.html\">&#8216;to spend a penny&#8217;<\/a>. That was before decimalisation, so we were talking of one old pence which is equivalent to 0.4 pence in current currency.<br \/>\nClearly we&#8217;ve had decades of inflation and so we&#8217;ve become used to public toilets charging 10 pence or 20 pence. Fairly recently,  toilets on railway stations in London have upped their charges to 30 pence. In the passageway under Parliament Street, at the south-east corner of Parliament Square, the cost is a staggering 50 pence &#8211; which seems especially cruel since so many tourists use this passageway.<br \/>\nHowever, this week, I came across a new record. I went to the cinema at Cineworld in the <a href=\"http:\/\/www.alondonguide.com\/londontrocadero.html\">Trocadero<\/a> which is located between Piccadilly Circus and Leicester Square in central London. As I left the cinema, I did not pass a toilet, so I thought that I would use the one for the Trocadero complex &#8211; until I found that they were going to charge me an incredible \u00a31 (for my American readers, that&#8217;s $1.64 at the current rate of exchange).  Now I call that taking the piss. So I refused to use that facility, walked down the road to Leicester Square, and used the free toilets there.<br \/>\nWhat&#8217;s the most expensive toilet you&#8217;ve used and where was it?<br \/>\nFootnote: On my first visit to Budapest after the collapse of communism in Hungary, I went for a meal in a restaurant in the centre of the city and was then charged to use their toilet.<br \/>\nHave you had any similar experiences?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Some time ago I blogged about the most expensive cup of coffee in the world. Today I have a new concern: the most expensive public toilet in the world. Now, of course, many toilets are free to use. But charging for women started with the addition of locks in the UK and gave rise to [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[10],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1445","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-miscellaneous"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1445","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1445"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1445\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1445"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1445"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1445"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}