He designed the first underground structures in Dunedin – the Gentleman’s and Ladies in the Octagon, and the Gentlemen’s only in Custom House Square.

He could report with some expertise – he had designed the first one in Sydney on Moore Street (now Martin Place) in 1901. He did battle with the Dunedin councillors on the issue of cost. An underground convenience was estimated at £1500 – compared to an above ground urinal at £20 this was a huge cost to a local authority. Richards argued that they could be built cheaper and still meet all the needs.

He was sent away to design the first ones for Dunedin with a budget of £1200. It was put on hold until Council came up with the money – they created a special fund in 1909 for the cause and the first undergrounds were opened in November and December 1910.

Richards returned to Council service in Sydney in 1912 and became Lord Mayor of Sydney from 1914-1915 and again in 1919-1920 until his death in 1920. He was created a Knight Bachelor in 1920. For more on Richard Richards see the City of Sydney Aldermen website .

• 3420 people visited the Custom House Square underground in less than 2 days in 1911!
• Shortly after the Octagon and Custom House Square facilities opened the numbers of people who used them were tallied – 46,000 people a month!

These stats seem huge (remembering 10 years earlier there were only 10 public urinals available across the city) and it seems hard to comprehend.

That is why the film footage below is gold – look at the people! What a throbbing metropolis Dunedin was in 1912. And if you look to the left hand corner about 10 seconds in you can see men going down the stairs of the Custom House Square undergrounds, showing the demand. I was so excited when I found this on the fabulous Ngā Taonga Sound & Vision website. Their wonderful staff edited the film for me.

The local authority worked hard to supply the shrubs to create the secluded access ways into the facilities and the City Engineer was proud of the work around this – Manor Place urinal was described “an object of beauty – draped as it is in lovely native shrubs” in 1919.

Even in the 1940s, you can see the Octagon is largely grass and flowerbeds except for the side with the toilet entrances – these have shrubs.

Shurbbery was important to the ideal that these facilities were not obvious or seen – this attitude did change over the 20th Century.

In 1861 the Town Board made a request to the government of the day to set apart portions of the Beach Reserve area (now where Cargill’s Monument is) for Public Water Closets.

The original toilets were shifted slightly to a new spot on the reclaimed ground in 1864. A report from the Inspector of Nuisances Nimon came in shortly after on 24 March 1864 complaining of the filthy state of them.

In April, the Town Board employed a man at one shilling a day to clean them.

The public facilities were seen as a way to improve the sanitation but as this Otago Daily Times article shows Dunedin suffered poor sanitary conditions in the “back slums” in 1864. The author states if the reader dared to venture off the main streets “let him adventure boldly behind its thin screen of decent houses and he will find himself in a marsh, covered with flax bushes, and irrigated by several streams as black as Styx”. The author dramatically goes on to state that “the copious black stream he has been tracing to its sources, has, however, shrunk into a narrow ditch of a yellowish green and extremely fetid filth, which flows sluggishly over a quaking black morass into which a walking-stick may be thrust to the handle without finding bottom.”

So 1860s Dunedin – not the nicest place to be!

The inside would be very similar to the 1910 underground interiors, so this gives us a good insight of what the demolished ones may have looked like in their heydey.

I plan to share info, insights and general musings from this research and wider Dunedin tidbits.

19th and early 20th century loos are becoming a rare and endangered part of our wider cultural and built heritage.  These facilities are often often-overlooked or remembered as places to avoid!

They do however, provide direct evidence for changing social attitudes to the provision of public loos and evidence for this shows in the change of architectural and aesthetic approaches to their design, construction and visibility.

My thesis aims to examine the little-known demise of the undergrounds through the perceptions and attitudes towards the public conveniences, using examples from the city of Dunedin’s rich history and heritage.