The Bathroom If Walls Could Talk: The History of the Home

People always ask, how do people go to the loo in dresses like this?

And there's an answer.

Thank you. This is a bourdaloue, and it's an amazing invention.

A secret chamber pot. What you do is slip it under here...

And nobody knows what I'm doing.

That feels a lot better.

I'm Dr Lucy Worsley, chief curator of the Historic Royal Palaces, based here at Hampton Court.

Another day at the office!

As a historian though, I'm fascinated not just by grand palaces,

but also by the more intimate moments and objects in history, and by how they inform our lives today.

Oh, it's exciting, it's exciting.

In this series, I'll be tracing the story of British domestic life through four rooms - the bathroom,

the bedroom, the living room, and the kitchen.

THEY LAUGH

From homes of the Middle Ages to the present day,

I'll be exploring the ways that our attitudes and habits have changed.

I'll be meeting some extraordinary people. He's glowing at us!

And doing some rather odd things.

SHE SCREAMS

'This time, from rebuilding Britain's first flushing toilet...'

I just can't imagine this is going to go right first time.

'..to taking a Victorian lady's bath, I'll be discovering how the bathroom

has developed over the past 700 years.

So in the Victorian age, poo becomes taboo.

In our modern houses, we take so much for granted.

All that comfort, privacy and technology that allows them to function.

Yet, all these things have taken centuries to develop, and every room

in the house has its own fascinating story.

This time, I'll be exploring the history of the bathroom, the room which has

taken the longest to evolve, yet the one we now consider to be the most essential in the house.

This is a very desirable bathroom with the power showers,

the double sinks and the big luxurious bathtubs, hot water on tap.

And, round there, a loo to flush everything away.

It is extraordinary

when you consider that 50 years ago, many houses didn't even have

plumbed-in baths, and 100 years before that, the bathroom as a specialised room didn't even exist.

So how did all this technology come to be developed,

and without it, how did people keep themselves clean?

My story starts in medieval England.

Today, we think of bathrooms as intensely private places, but in the Middle Ages, everything

from washing and grooming to going to the toilet took place in public, in buildings just like this one.

No functioning medieval bath houses exist in Britain today, so I've come

to these modern baths in London's East End to have a steam with my fellow historian, Sally Dixon Smith.

I've got the idea that medieval people were really smelly and never washed.

But I think I'm wrong, aren't I?

You are. It's a very-widely held misconception.

I think because of this idea that the Tudors and the Stuarts are very

smelly, hence medieval people must have absolutely stunk to high heaven.

But it's not the case. Bath houses were very common in medieval cities and people would go quite regularly.

The fashion for bathing had been established by medieval knights.

After years fighting the crusades in the east, they returned home not only with citrus fruits and spices,

but with a taste for steam baths, called hammams.

700 years after Britain's Roman baths had fallen into ruin,

bath houses were now built in every city.

There were various ways of creating steam, you could heat up rocks or heat up tiles

or ceramics in the fire, and either cast water on them or plunge them into water to heat the water.

You could also pipe in steam from bake houses nearby, from their ovens, in order to warm up the steam houses,

and people would also put spices and herbs in the water to give

a lovely smell and be rinsed down with rose water, so all in all it must have been a lovely experience.

and most surprisingly of all, bathing was mixed.

Men and women

-in there together, then?

-Yes.

They were sometimes being used for shady business, people were meeting

people who weren't their husband or wife there?

You do get that implication, you get that quite a lot in literature,

that it's something husbands fear, is that their wives are going to go to the bath house to meet their lovers.

But, who knows? That's literature.

Lancelot always seems to get propositioned whenever he has a bath, but then Lancelot's

James Bond and James Bond always gets propositioned whenever he has a bath.

In London's baths, or "stews" as they were called,

you could have your hair cut, listen to music, get a shave or eat a meal.

And they were so popular that they were soon licensed not just for bathing.

The Bishop of Winchester, for instance, in Southwark,

licensed bath houses, and licensed prostitution essentially

and some of the women working in bath houses were known as wagtails, the Bishop's wagtails.

This may be the origin of why women are referred to as "birds" today.

You would have been respectable in the bath house because you had your hair covered.

-Oh!

-And although there was a greater sense of nudity, or you might see people naked,

women should still keep their hair covered because that was particularly private and sexual,

and only prostitutes would have their hair down like me.

Oh, Sally, I'm sorry to say that you're showing yours!

Yes, very indiscreet.

People in medieval England were quite surprisingly clean, bathing, keeping their houses clean.

In fact in towns, if you didn't keep your house clean, you could be

had up before a court of nuisance, given the equivalent of an ASBO

and told you had to do a better job if smells from your property offended anybody else.

But bath houses did fall out of fashion by the Tudor period.

They just became too much associated with prostitution.

They still existed, but they were now known as bagnios and bagnios turned into bordellos.

But it wasn't only bathing that was a mixed, communal activity in medieval London.

On the river, just near the bath houses, were also the public loos.

We're on the modern London Bridge, but this picture shows

its predecessor, the ancient London Bridge.

And you see it is covered in houses, there were 138 houses on the bridge,

and they had their own communal toilet. It was very famous.

It was London's first public toilet.

It was used by the residents, and also by travellers arriving into the city.

And you can see how sensible it was to put the toilet on a bridge,

because all the waste could fall straight down and be washed away by the river.

All of London's rivers were used for this purpose.

I do like the idea of these huge communal toilets that London had in the Middle Ages.

They had these long benches with holes in them and everyone used to sit in there

having a chat while they went.

And with no modern loo paper, they had some interesting alternatives.

We need to address the very important question of how they wiped their bottoms.

Firstly, the legacy of the Romans was alive and well, the sponge on a stick for the highest in society.

Very comfortable and convenient.

Also, a book of instructions for a noble household recommends that the master used a piece of linen

or blanket, also clean and convenient and comfortable.

Lower down in society, you had to make do with what you can find.

This is arse-wisp, straw, leaves, that sort of thing.

And if that wasn't available, there's one more alternative.

By the end of the Middle Ages, Britain's love affair with communal bathing was coming to an end.

By the end of the 16th century, bathing had fallen out of fashion.

People weren't washing like they had done in the medieval period.

There were a couple of reasons for this.

Firstly, it was quite hard to find clean water in crowded Tudor cities.

Secondly, there was a medical reason.

There was this new idea that sickness could be transmitted

through the air, called miasma, and if you were bathing in hot water and your pores were opening up,

this would make you vulnerable to disease.

Air carrying bad stuff would go in through your skin.

So bathing had become dangerous.

The plague arrived seven times in 200 years.

It killed 20% of the population and killed off bathing as well.

In 1546, Henry VIII shut Britain's bath houses for good.

Now, with no recourse to bathrooms of any kind, the Tudors came up with new theories on how to keep clean.

Instead of bathing, the Tudors put their faith in something else - white linen underclothes.

They thought that linen worn next to the skin would soak up the sweat and the toxins from the body.

So instead of washing themselves, they washed their linen instead.

To understand what it must have been like to wash linen without

the modern washing machine,

I've come to the Weald and Downland Museum in west Sussex to experience a typical

Tudor wash day with historians Kathy Flower-Bond and Hannah Tiplady.

I felt like a horse. So we are making a sort of filtering, drainage system really?

'The first step in the process was to make a soap called lye.

'Following an age-old method, it was made by filtering water through ash from the fire...'

You can see it's starting to come through.

'..through stones and straw in a bucket.

'It was then boiled down

'with mutton fat and mixed with herbs to make a sweet-smelling detergent.'

That looks like soap that I would recognise.

That's what Kathy's using over there.

You rub that directly onto the bits that are really dirty.

Bit of elbow grease necessary.

Lots of elbow grease.

After being soaked in lye and scrubbed with soap,

the linen was then bashed with a bat called a beetle.

Imagine doing this all day.

You'd really need strong muscles to do this.

It is quite fun and physical.

Now, are these things the origin of ball games?

The kids who were running around...

-Playing around with the beetles and the balls?

-Yes.

So women invented cricket!

Yeah!

Whereas the outer clothes were never washed, underclothes were washed every week.

It was a female-dominated activity, but Tudor men could still make one vital contribution.

I'm looking for a man.

Can I ask you a favour?

For centuries women have been doing the washing and we feel men haven't been contributing enough.

We are hoping that you, today, can contribute some stain remover for us?

Go forth and do your duty.

Ah! Great, you are a gent.

-Thank you.

-Happy washing!

-Thank you.

So why are we pouring Brian's urine on to this sheet?

Well, it's the best thing to whiten things, and if you've got really stubborn stains, grease,

grass, anything like that, then that is by far the best stain remover there ever was.

'After soaking the linen in urine for two days, they gave it a good rinse

'and then spun it on a ringing post...'

We are on the spin cycle of the washing machine.

You can see how red your hands are getting.

'..then hung it out on hawthorn hedges or rosemary bushes to dry.'

You can see that hawthorn is just perfect for this,

because all the prickles come through and hold it in place.

Absolutely, you don't need clothes pegs!

We've just done everything the modern washing machine does really.

We soaked the clothes, we added the detergent, we agitated it and then we rinsed it and spun it out.

But we only really washed one sheet and it took nearly all morning.

So it's quite a lot of work really.

I suppose what I've learned is that it shows that, although we think

Tudor people were dirty, they didn't wash, this is a misconception.

They put a huge amount of effort, their women put a huge amount

of effort into making sure everyone had clean, white linen.

Across the whole of Tudor society, clean linen, not a clean body, was the true measure of cleanliness.

Indeed, for the very rich, it was a show of brilliant white

at the collar and cuffs that advertised not only one's status, but one's moral worth.

The whiter the white, the more godly the person.

After experiencing a Tudor laundry, I've decided to take it one step further

and find out what it was really like under those collars and cuffs.

So, just like 16th century people, I've decided not to bathe for a whole week.

Instead, I'll wash just my face and my hands, and wear clean linen underclothes every day.

I think it will be challenging not to wash.

I feel bad when I don't wash.

I wash every day.

I'm a fiend for hot water.

This is the morning of my third day now without a bath,

and I have to say I'm not very happy.

I feel itchy and horrible all over, and yesterday, I resorted to wearing my hat.

I had that on all day, because I felt that this would horrify the human eye.

It just feels dirty, dirty, dirty.

I'm worried that I smell a bit, so I've come to work today with this beautiful pomander that will

hopefully protect my colleagues from the pestilential vapours which my body may be omitting.

It's an orange, and the flesh has been removed, and it's been replaced by a sponge soaked in vinegar.

And these are cloves. If I were going out into Tudor London, I would carry this with me

and it would be like a portable air freshener I suppose.

Reminds me of Christmas, not bad.

Yes?

I'll go with the smell.

Come on, ladies, noses up close.

Do you like it? What has been quite interesting is people's reactions to me.

A lot of people have gone, "Ugh, that's disgusting!"

But actually a lot of my older colleagues at work have

said "Oh, well, when I was a girl I only had one bath a week"

and that really shows you how things have changed in the later 20th century.

But the one body part the Tudors did clean carefully was their teeth

so I'm trying out a few period recipes with a Tudor toothbrush.

It's a twig.

It's got a nice hairy end. That's rosemary and salt.

And the salt gives it a bit of graininess, which is what you actually need.

This is tooth powder made out of burnt toast.

I set the fire alarm off while I was making that.

It's pretty hopeless, because it's too soft. That's vinegar.

It's a kind of mouthwash.

Ooh! That just blows your head off.

'As my final day of not bathing approaches, I can't contain my delight.'

It's the end of the last day of the experiment. That's a whole week!

And here is my bag of things.

Oh, I'm so happy to see these things again, look! Here they all are.

Modern life, and that delightful sound that you can hear up there is the water running into my bath,

which I'm going to leap into in just a second. Shampoo, hooray!

Bye-bye.

My week without washing was...

educational rather than enjoyable.

In fact, it was quite horrible.

But that's because for me it was a very strange and novel experience.

One thing that really helped was putting on a clean T-shirt every day. That was intensely pleasurable.

Much more so than normal.

The other thing that was pretty handy, I rather liked, was the way

I could take my basin of water to wash my face to any room, to any part of the house.

I could even wash my face in bed if I wanted to.

And this is the real big difference between the Tudors and today.

They just had no concept of a bathroom.

That idea lay centuries into the future.

They did still need to go to the loo though, and they had numerous different options for that.

In Tudor England, there were three levels of toilets.

The lowest were communal privies called great houses of easement.

Next were chamber pots, whose contents were often thrown into the street.

And the rich used close stools, velvet-padded chairs with a pot

inside, which were carried away and cleaned out by servants.

Elizabeth I even had her own stool carriage that followed her wherever she went.

But, all of a sudden, in 1596, a revolutionary new invention arrived,

Britain's first flushing toilet.

It was a device so ahead of its time, it brought its inventor instant fame.

Intrigued to know how it worked, I've come to a modern plumber's workshop

in order to rebuild it using the original 16th-century instructions.

So A is the tank.

Yes, A is the tank, which is known nowadays as a toilet cistern.

I've got one of those at home, but I don't have fish in mine.

No, that is an added extra if you want!

It was invented by the poet Sir John Harington, godson to Elizabeth I,

and so impressed the Queen that it was installed in Richmond Palace.

Sir John wrote a book describing how to make your "worst privy

"as sweet as your best chamber."

And called it the Metamorphosis of Ajax,

a pun on the Tudor word for a toilet - a "jakes".

Filled with water from the palace well,

it flushed into a private cesspit, which was cleaned out once a month by boys called gong scourers.

That is the equivalent of the sewer.

Yes, sewer, septic tank, whatever.

The toilet had two valves, one at the top to flush water into the

toilet bowl, the other to release it into the cesspit.

And to save precious water, a key was fitted so that only the keyholder could release the flush,

"after at least 20 persons had used it."

I can see how all this sort of might come together, but it seems quite clever.

Is it still how a toilet works today?

The essentials are exactly the same.

-That's remarkable.

-Yes, the same idea as what we use now.

Good job, Sir John Harington.

After soldering and fixing the flush pipes into place, we are finally ready to test our contraption.

I just can't believe this is going to go right first time.

There's too much potential for disaster here, I think.

I suggest we fill it up and give it a try.

Here we go.

It's leaking a little bit...

But it's going to work. Here we are.

We are putting in the tomatoes.

We chose tomatoes because they were a brand new Elizabethan fruit that

had only just caught on, so it seemed appropriate.

-Full flush.

-Whoosh!

Hey, that's really effective, look at that! That is looking good.

Shall we do the bottom flush?

Let's go for the bottom flush.

Hey, it's flushing! It's flushing.

Brilliant. Did you see how well they went down there?

I see how well they went down.

The tank didn't hold up too well, but made out of wood, it's not too bad, is it?

But the main thing is that the tomatoes made its way beautifully down into the cesspit.

I'm amazed that it worked! I never thought it would.

But it's actually really effective.

-It had a really powerful swoosh! Good effort.

-Good teamwork.

But despite its revolutionary design, the Ajax was too early

for its time and it wouldn't reappear for another 200 years.

In a way, it is quite surprising that once the flushing toilet has been invented, it doesn't catch on.

But there are a couple of very good reasons for this.

Firstly, it smells. It still smells.

There is nothing to stop bad smells coming out and affecting the person who is using the toilet.

And secondly, it's fixed.

It's a great big structure.

The Queen doesn't want to have to GO to the toilet.

She wants the toilet to go to her.

So that's why the close stool remains more popular.

As long as you've got someone to empty it for you, then flushing is just a bit of a gimmick.

But whatever method the Elizabethans used to relieve themselves,

there was always the question of what to do with the consequences.

Most houses had cesspits, which were cleaned out by night soil men,

and the waste was used for compost on market gardens.

But this cost a shilling a week.

Many Londoners dumped their waste directly into the rivers instead.

To supply London with cleaner water, it was clear that a new solution was needed.

When we turn on our taps in our modern bathrooms and

fresh, clean water comes out, it is something of a miracle.

A huge amount of plumbing and piping makes it all possible.

The beginnings of this infrastructure were laid in late Elizabethan London.

It was a crowded, smelly, dirty city. Its rivers were polluted.

It began to be a priority for Elizabethans to find an alternative to the stinky Thames.

And that alternative was called the New River, where I've come to meet historian, David Adshead.

So, David, did they come up with the idea then because, in Elizabethan London, they started to realise

that their sewage and drinking water was all mixed up together and this wasn't a good thing?

That's absolutely it.

By the end of Queen Elizabeth's reign, there were 180,000 people

living in London and there wasn't a proper water supply or sewage system.

Built by Sir Hugh Myddleton in 1613, the New River brought water all the way from a spring in Hertfordshire.

It took 10 years to build, using a single plough and 100 men digging by hand.

Right then, let's have a look on your map.

That's the full extent of the New River, going all the way

down from its source here.

So it winds all the way along here.

To Haringey,

Stroud Green, Finsbury Park.

-Islington, the new riverhead.

-So did you say that is 40 miles long?

Well, as the crow flies it's less than 20, but because of

all the wiggles, it was over 40 miles when it was first constructed.

So what determined its route?

Well, what they were trying to do was to take advantage of gravity.

Rather than have the cost of pumping, etc etc, and long-term maintenance, they simply followed the

-100-foot contour line.

-That's quite a job.

As an engineering feat, it's up there with the Channel Tunnel or the Great Western Railway.

It's absolutely extraordinary.

The water ended up in reservoirs at Sadler's Wells,

from where it flowed down into the City through carved wooden pipes.

They procured elm from all the home counties,

thousands and thousands of elms, they bought them by the ton, and they chopped them into five-foot lengths,

and they then bored them out, so these are the strings of elm pipes.

Was there a particular reason for the choice of elm?

Well, elm has fairly unique properties.

It has a twisted grain, so that meant where the

pipes were exposed to sunlight they were less likely to split.

Makes the best pipes.

-So these pipes are just running along the top of the road? That's amazing.

-They are.

Might we have seen that in this street here, a great run of pipes?

I think you probably would, and there are descriptions in some

streets and squares in London of as many as nine strings of these pipes.

Nine pipes all at once, that's incredible.

There can't have been room for the carriages.

Lead pipes called quills were then drilled into the wood and connected to paying customers' homes.

For the first time, fresh Hertfordshire water

instead of the dirty Thames could be used for drinking and washing.

It cost 24 shillings a year, the equivalent of £160 today.

It was such a successful system that it was still being used 100 years later in Georgian London.

Here it is. The point at which water finally gets into the house.

It comes down in these underground kitchen basements.

There's a tap here, not everybody had a tap and not everybody had water every day.

Different streets had their own water day when the supply would be turned on for a couple of hours.

So when it was your water day, you got all your pots and pans,

you filled up everything you could because, once water day was over, that's it till next time.

The water was then carried upstairs to dressing tables set up in the corners of Georgian bedrooms.

These "toilette stations"

were like modern bathrooms in miniature, with their trio of jug, bowl and washstand.

This is where Georgian men and women would have had their morning wash.

Unlike today, this was a social event.

Wealthy people would even allow visitors to watch.

To learn more about the Georgian toilettes, I'm meeting historian Amanda Vickery.

I think I would be washing my face in that?

And my hands? Any other body parts?

I think the extremities.

I think the face and hands, and sometimes water is enough, you know, a wipe down with linen.

Because again, how much of your body is going to be seen by the world?

-It's what protrudes out of your clothes.

-We call this a basin.

It is the forerunner to the modern washbasin that we have in our bathrooms today, isn't it?

Well, I suppose this is the beginning of the idea that you are going to have a sink.

Some servant has got to labour up the stairs with that hot water.

Do you know, I do like the idea that the washbasin comes to me, rather than I have to go to the washbasin.

I imagine it's lovely just rolling out of bed and there it is, all lovely and warm.

To cater for the tastes of an aspirational middle class, new items of

washware exploded onto the market, from men's shaving tables to a thoroughly new invention, the bidet.

It didn't really catch on, did it? Although it did in France.

The interesting thing is that it seems that it's prostitutes and courtesans in France who really drive

on the fashion for the bidet, so I love that idea that these women who are so despised were actually at the

forefront of fashion, because clearly it's in their interest to be as fresh as possible for the next customer.

Hmm, but in England they were always viewed with grave suspicion, really.

Unsurprising really if it's something that's deployed by a French prostitute.

You can't imagine some nice Protestant girl thinking, "Ooh, that's the thing for me."

Exposed to the eyes of visitors, a washing station was also a sign of status.

It was crammed with perfume bottles, combs, head scratchers, all the

fashionable accoutrements, including make-up.

So, is this made of something like cochineal, ground up?

Cochineal was one ingredient of rouge, and the other thing you could do is get a red ribbon and cut it

and wet it and you could use that.

I think I would just slap the cheeks myself.

I think I've gone a bit overboard, do you?

-Definitely.

-Do you think I look a little bit too French?

You look like a sinister doll.

Get it off! Get it off!

Despite access to fresh water, the toilette was more about make-up,

perfume and powder, more about disguising dirt than washing it off.

And to make matters worse, in 1712, Queen Anne imposed a tax on soap,

so burdensome that soap became a luxury item.

Can you possibly give me a hand with my wig?

I'm just putting something around myself.

"Give me a hand", you mean be your servant.

Everybody thinks, "I'd love to go back in the past." They think

they'd marry Mr Darcy, but of course they'd be the housemaid,

I mean the ladies maid. Am I sticking it on?

Oh, well, if you wouldn't mind.

But this is a real treat, Amanda, if you want to do it, to use the little bellows.

Now, you can't complain about that.

Lots of people think that the 18th century was the

age of elegance but I think it was the age of body odour.

However, we have seen something very interesting up there.

That is the birth of the modern bathroom, that little corner of the bedroom.

It has the ingredients of a basin, fresh water, even a little piece of soap if you could afford it.

So that's the first time we've seen part of the house just given over to washing, and that corner of the

bedroom will go on to become a whole room of its own.

Even if the toilette involved more perfume and powder than water, the concept of bathing

did return to prominence for the first time since the medieval age.

But, rather than bathing in hot water to cleanse the body,

the Georgians preached the medicinal virtues of cold water.

In particular, sea water.

Georgian doctors were recommending that you immerse your body into sea water to cure practically anything,

from constipation to infertility, to what they called "disorders of the codpiece economy".

And, in fact, the quotation I like most of all is from the doctor who

recommends that you go into cold water because it will "powerfully excite your stupid mind."

The sea was regarded as frightening, so for those who couldn't pluck up

the courage to get into it, it was recommended they drink it instead.

This peculiar-looking drink is the prescription of Dr Richard Russell

and this will cure absolutely anything, if you believed him.

It's a pint of seawater boiled with milk and cream of tartar.

Now I'm going to tell you what it tastes like.

That tastes exactly like vomit and I'd rather have a swim in the sea than drink a pint of that.

OK. Ha-ha! It's time. The moment has come. I'm going to give it a go!

SHE SQUEALS

To preserve their modesty, ladies wore long dresses weighted down with lead so

that they wouldn't reveal anything that shouldn't be seen by gentlemen.

They were taken down to the waters in horse-drawn bathing machines

and helped in by doctors and elderly matrons.

No such luxury for me.

Oh!

Ladies were advised not to plunge in all at once in case it was too much

for them, in case they burst a blood vessel, so I might have gone in a bit too quickly.

But that is really rather strangely pleasant.

It's certainly woken me up, it's roused up my drowsy spirits...

..and it's invigorated my stupid mind.

I really quite enjoyed it, but I can see why some Georgian

ladies thought it was all too much and they never did it again.

Over the next 100 years, between 1750 and 1850, Britain would now plunge headlong into the greatest

social and economic change in its history - the Industrial Revolution.

Alongside cotton mills and steam trains came gas lamps and the first kitchen range.

This age of invention would transform the home and culminate

in the Great Exhibition of 1851, the greatest showcase for British technology the world had ever seen.

The watchmaker, Alexander Cumming, became the first to reinvent Sir John Harington's Ajax toilet in

1775, but it was at the Great Exhibition that the masses would not only see new pieces of

bathroom technology, but also use a flushing toilet for the first time.

The lack of public toilets had once restricted

women's mobility outside the home but now the streets of London could potentially be transformed.

51 Bedford Street is not a well-known address, but it is so important in the history of London.

It's now a newsagent, but this is where the first public toilets for women were.

This was just in the wake of the Great Exhibition of 1851, where

over 800,000 people used the public loo and were really impressed by it.

Unfortunately, it didn't really catch on here.

There were two reasons for this. Firstly, women were ashamed to be seen to be using a public toilet,

women weren't supposed to go, they also weren't expected to be out on the streets of the city.

Secondly, it was expensive.

It cost you tuppence to actually use the toilet, another two to wash your hands, so that's four pence.

That's not exactly spending a penny, is it?

The public loo didn't catch on immediately but the flushing toilet did, and the main beneficiary of

this loo revolution was not a person, but a city - Stoke-on-Trent.

A regional hub of the Industrial Revolution, it was here in the

kilns of its potteries that the world's toilets would be made.

In a gallery devoted entirely to the humble loo, I'm meeting Angela Lee,

a curator who knows more about toilets than anyone else on earth.

So Stoke-on-Trent, it's really the toilet capital of the world, isn't it?

I've never seen so many different toilets before.

-Is it truly the largest collection in the whole world?

-It is.

That's incredible. 'This museum is filled with hundreds of toilets, all

'of which were patented by a number of competing Victorian inventors.

'The most famous of them all was Thomas Crapper,

'a man who many believe to be the sole inventor of the flushing loo.'

It would be great if you could explode for me the myth of Thomas Crapper.

Thomas Crapper is important in sanitation history, but not for

-the reasons people think he is.

-He didn't invent the flushing toilet?

No, he didn't invent the flushing toilet because no one person did, and crap doesn't come from his name.

-That's such a disappointment.

-It is, I know.

But it's a really old word meaning rubbish or waste or something you desperately want to get rid of.

In the 18th century, people were using chamber pots and close stools in different rooms in the house,

sometimes with other people present, but now this becomes a completely solitary activity.

It does. I think there has always been a sense of privacy if you could afford it.

So, in the Victorian age, poo becomes taboo?

Certainly you didn't want to be seen, and that was a problem with the early toilets.

They were jolly noisy, so quite often what would happen was

you'd use the chamber pot and then empty it into your flushing toilet when there was nobody else about.

Elizabeth I's Ajax had failed to prevent noxious gases rising up its pipes and into the palace,

but all these toilets featured the great technological breakthrough - U-bend and S-bend pipes.

When flushed, the curve of the pipes created water traps which

prevented smells from coming back up into the room.

With this design breakthrough, toilets of all shapes and sizes flooded the market,

determined to win over the public with some fabulous names.

It seems to me that people were inventing new types of toilet every

ten minutes throughout the 19th century.

Certainly in the 1870s. It's like mobile phones, they're going off in all different directions.

Every company wants to get into this new big market of making toilets.

But then 10, 15 years later, it's all settled and we have the

British standard toilet, the toilet we know today.

As Victorian England fell under the spell of the flushing loo,

the sudden surge in mass flushing created a major public problem.

In order to see just how big a problem it was, I've come to the Northern Outfall Sewer in London.

Until the 1840s, your own sewage was your own problem.

You kept it in your own cesspit that belonged to your house, or you paid night soil men to take it away.

What happened in the 1840s was that the government said you've

got to link up your water closet to the general drains, which we use for surface water. It was a good idea,

but it just didn't work because the drains couldn't take it, they weren't designed for it.

And literally, if there was a storm, all the sewage came back up

and exploded all over Holborn, for example.

1858 was the Great Stink, when the Thames was absolutely

horrific and everyone realised that London needed new drains.

The answer, the solution to the whole problem, we can see it down there.

And that solution was the world's first

purpose-built sewer system, built by the engineer Joseph Bazalgette.

I think they could just lower me down, like a...carcass.

You can float down like an angel, Luce.

Descend out of the heavens.

Where's the floor?

Go on, Luce, down you come, a couple more steps. It's not very deep.

Only about a couple hundred mill.

Am I standing in actual poo, here?

You are, indeed. You're not up into your neck in it yet.

OK, up top.

There you are, Luce. Welcome to Barrel No. 3

of the Northern Outfall Sewer.

I can see why people say the sewers are like a cathedral, because

it is a bit echoey and spectacular.

Are you impressed as an engineer today with what Bazalgette did?

Yes.

Do you think he was good at his job?

He was bloody marvellous!

Three cholera epidemics had swept over London by the mid-1800s, killing more than 100,000.

Cholera was still believed to be transmitted through bad air, or miasma.

The sewers were designed to enclose it

and London's waste, carrying it away from the rivers for the first time.

Measuring 1,300 miles and built in just nine years, this remarkable feat

was followed by similar schemes all over the land.

So Bazalgette and his amazing sewers, they allowed the modern bathroom to happen.

You couldn't have water closets until Bazalgette came along and made this transformation.

With the creation of the sewers, and a city-wide network of lead pipes to replace the wooden pipes

of the past, houses could now be built with a wonderful new feature - piped water which went not just

to the basement, but to all areas of the house, in particular to a completely new room, the bathroom.

In order to see some really advanced Victorian plumbing, I've come to this London house.

I'm being shown around by the curator, Reena Suleman.

Essentially used by the servants,

with what they called a revolving washbasin, or a tip-up sink.

You have your wash and you revolve it, and the water rushes out

and you can see right down the drain there. That's how it works.

This house was rented in the 1870s by the artist Linley Sambourne.

It came not only with a downstairs toilet, but also plumbed-in bathrooms.

For Mrs Sambourne though, being connected to the sewers was not a wonder but a curse.

Here we go, so this is Mrs Sambourne's bedroom, and this

is her own plumbed-in washbasin.

It would have been considered quite avant-garde at the time.

Now, I've got this idea that she didn't like drains, and having been

down the sewer, I can really understand that.

It was disgusting down there. And she kept the plug in at all times.

She did, and not only did she keep the plug in, but she hardly ever used it.

She doesn't like that. She's still using the old system, which is here,

and that is the chamber pot that she is still using,

even though there are three plumbed-in toilets in this house.

Now, I don't blame her, because it's kind of nicer in here than it is in the cold stony bathroom, and people

would have seen her if she had gone to the bathroom, which is immodest.

Yes, but also given the costumes they were wearing as well, it would

have been quite cumbersome, with the myriad of skirts they had underneath them, to be able to pull those up.

-You'd need to be in private, in a big room with a chamber pot.

-Yes.

And Mrs Sambourne was not alone.

In Dundee, a Mrs Owler claimed to have been poisoned by the proximity

of her bedroom sink to the city's main sewer.

Mr Sambourne, however, had a little more faith in his plumbing.

Da-dah!

We are in a recognisably modern bathroom for the first time.

-Yes.

-Here it is. This is the 1880s, is it, that he has this put in?

-He does.

-Mr Sambourne had a cold bath here every morning, as he didn't have hot water yet.

Although as an artist, keen to explore the new medium

of photography, he didn't use the bath just for bathing.

This whole bath was designed to house his chemicals, so this shelf was fitted just here.

So when he was doing the photographic stuff,

he'd open up the shelf, and put all the equipment on here.

We've got a few photos here.

They are rather interesting - what's going on with these?

Photography was very key to the way that he worked.

He referred to them as his pencil sketches, and he would develop these

photographs, and trace them and do his final drawings for Punch.

-Now, was it absolutely essential that all these ladies were naked?

-No, no.

And what did his wife think about all of this?

The interesting thing is Mrs King, who was one of Mr Sambourne's favourite models, who came here

to be photographed, and that's actually, that table survives and is in the morning room.

That's in his own morning room in his own house?

-Yes.

-Does his wife know that Mrs King was sitting in the morning room with no clothes on?

Well, no. You have to read their diaries in parallel

for that particular day, so she's actually holidaying in Ramsgate.

She's out of the way when Mrs King comes round.

And he's given the servants the day off.

I've got a book of bathroom porn here.

It's full of new technologies that exploded in the late 19th century.

Between 1855 and 1900, 4,700 people applied for a patent to do with some new bit of bathroom kit.

And the middle classes are creating bathrooms that we would recognise.

This is where it all starts, in the late 19th century.

Whereas toilet technology had been the obsession of the 1840s,

now it was the turn of other fixtures and fittings.

There's things in this book like power showers, there's one here that looks just like

the rainmaker shower, that you can get today and is hugely expensive.

Charles Dickens had a shower that was called the Demon.

Don't you love that?

'What all these patents revealed was that bathing had now become

'an established part of middle-class life.'

Theories on the role of miasma or bad air in spreading disease were

finally debunked by the discovery of germs in the late 19th century.

Now daily bathing was no longer seen as a novelty, but as a medical necessity.

Soon even people lower down the social scale began to see improvements in sanitation.

So, in order to see how the other half lived, I've come to the back-to-backs in Birmingham,

a series of 19th century workers' houses

built literally back to back, where I'm being guided round the communal yard by local historian Kris Gough.

Most back to backs had them, and they were usually in the corner of the yard.

-This is 1870s...

-1870s upwards.

-A proper flushing toilet.

-That flushed into the new sewerage system, the Victorian sewerage system.

We've got 11 houses.

-And only three privies?

-Well, there would have been four originally, for up to 60 people sharing four toilets.

60 people were using these four? Do you think there were sometimes queues out here then?

There could have been, but the doors were always closed, you never knew who was in, there were no locks.

So you'd go... and they'd go "I'm in here", so you'd have to wait.

And despite the invention of commercially manufactured toilet paper

in 1863, users of these privies resorted to less expensive ways of wiping their bottoms.

I'm just preparing some Victorian toilet paper, as would have been used in this Victorian privy.

Here at the back to backs they would have been using

wastepaper, newspaper, junk paper, and in fact, even today, if I get junk mail through my letter box,

I might well describe it as bumf, bits of old paper, and in fact that word originally meant bum fodder.

You would talk about wastepaper as bum fodder because you would

literally use it to wipe your bottom.

But despite the breakthrough of flushing toilets,

at the back to backs, that's where bathroom technology ended.

With just one tap in the yard and little access to clean water,

instead of bathing, the women went to enormous lengths to keep their

family's clothes clean, a legacy seemingly unchanged since the Tudor age.

Here we are. What do you call this? Not the brew house?

No, this is the bruhus.

-We are in the bruhus.

-And we are going to light the fire because that is the first job of the day.

The single Victorian copper, used to heat up the water, was shared between all 11 houses.

So washday was every 11 days.

-Quite a hard day for the ladies. They would start really, really early.

-And finish really late.

We don't just get to sit here looking at it and warming our hands?

No, no, no! We've got lots of jobs to do.

It's raining out there, though.

Alongside the copper, the women had mangles,

dollies and Canadian cones, making the process of washing a little easier than it was in Tudor times.

So this is like a pre-preparation for your washing.

Like a pre-wash,

After a vigorous pre-wash called a "poss",

the boiling copper was then prepared with new commercially available soaps.

You need to put in your soap.

-Would you like to have a go?

-I would.

Mind your fingers while you do.

In 1853, someone finally decided that

it would be better for the hygiene of the nation if soap wasn't taxed.

The government actually give up a million pounds of revenue as a result of that decision.

But, on the other hand, hygiene becomes much better.

The Victorian age is the age of soap.

'After William Gladstone, the Chancellor of the Exchequer,

'repealed soap tax for the first time since 1712, soap became much more readily available.

'From the posher Pears and Palmolives, to the more affordable, but horrible-smelling carbolic.'

When people wanted to have a bath, did they heat up the water for that in here as well?

-Yes.

-And that would have been augmented with stuff heated on the stove in the house?

Yes, you would have done kettles and saucepans on the stove in the house.

The bath, the old tin bath, sometimes they were on the top

of the cellar head, but sometimes they were kept as a communal one that was kept in the bruhus.

So you take that, and you set it up in your kitchen?

In the warmest place in the house, right in front of the fire.

And then you would fill it just once for the whole family, wouldn't you?

You can see how much trouble and effort it all was.

Absolutely, so you would take buckets and buckets across

and you'd start to fill it up, and you would use the old carbolic again, and Dad would go in probably first.

Then it would go down all the family until it got to the children, and you could probably get two or three

of the children in together, into the same water.

So the very dirtiest water was left for the smallest baby, in fact.

-Usually.

-It's the survival of the fittest then, isn't it?

-Yeah!

And the old phrase, "don't throw your baby out with the bathwater",

it's probably because you couldn't find them, because the water was so mucky.

Private bathrooms might have been out of reach for working-class people,

but those at the upper end of society rejected plumbing for entirely different reasons.

With legions of servants to heat up their hot water, they simply didn't need it.

In fact, here at Shugborough, there is the heartbreaking story of a poor little housemaid, 14 years old,

whose job it was to fill up the big boiling copper in the morning.

50 buckets of water every day she had to pour into that thing.

At Shugborough Hall, it was the housemaid's job

to prepare Lady Anson's bath in her bedroom twice a week.

I've always wanted to experience for myself just how much hard work it was to fill up a bath...

and I'm getting a sense of it already.

The bedroom is miles away. I'm wondering what I've taken on here.

I'm going to carry the hot water all the way upstairs to the bath.

In grand houses like this, not only was plumbing deemed middle-class and vulgar,

but worst of all, Victorian pipes could burst and wreak havoc on the fabric of an 18th century mansion.

I reckon the housemaid was a lot fitter than the lady of the house.

After 50 trips by the humble housemaid, the semi-dressed mistress of the house

would get into what she called her modesty bath.

Although I'm in a super-luxurious bedroom, my bath could be more luxurious.

I'm using carbolic soap, and I'm using a rough sponge, and I'm still wearing my shift,

not sort of luxuriating in the water, because upper-class ladies

still had a puritanical, suspicious attitude towards bathing.

It was considered degenerate to loll about in the water.

Something your husband's French mistress might do, not something a proper English girl would do.

I read a brilliant ladies' hygiene manual from 1844

saying that certain parts mustn't be washed more than once a day.

To do so would be degenerate and would lead to unfortunate consequences. It must never be done.

So upper-class ladies went on bathing in these rather sort of ramshackle camping-like conditions

right into the 20th century.

Well after hot water and plumbing and bathrooms were available, and it's hilarious when

the dollar princesses, the American heiresses come over

to marry English aristocrats in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

They are shocked by the primitive conditions they find in English country houses.

It wouldn't be until 1910 that Shugborough would finally

get its first bathroom, in an age that would see huge advances in the provision of hot water to the home.

The first Victorian systems had heated up hot water directly from the kitchen range.

But the laying on of gas in the late 19th century

gave rise to geyser baths, which had to be lit by hand, and which had a terrifying tendency to explode.

And finally, the early 20th century saw the great breakthrough,

the invention of the high-pressure circulating gas boiler.

This was the final piece of the jigsaw and the modern bathroom was complete.

By the beginning of the 20th century, it looked like things were coming together for the bathroom.

Hot water was available, the plumbing was in place.

People understood that it was healthy for them to keep their bodies clean.

But there was one thing missing before people could enjoy a guilt- free wallow in a hot bath -

there needed to be a change in the moral climate.

This only happened after the First World War, and there were two main reasons for it.

The first was Hollywood.

On the silver screen, people could see film stars wallowing

in bubble baths, taking telephone calls, making it all look perfectly normal.

And the second influence was where film stars themselves stayed in London, luxury hotels like this one.

Victorian hotels were built with only one bathroom for every floor,

but these hotels had an en suite in every room.

And so to get me ready for the glamour of the 1930s bathroom,

I'm having a Hollywood makeover with the help of all the latest '30s beauty products.

A teeny, tiny razor!

A rapid shampoo which requires no rinsing.

You've turned me into a film star.

It's amazing!

Da-dah!

So this is the bathroom in 1932. It's totally different from its Victorian predecessor.

Victorian bathrooms were masculine places, very functional, probably designed for washing

yourself in cold water, but this is a room for enjoying yourself.

It's just fabulous, isn't it?

This is Hollywood glamour brought into English society,

and you can just imagine a film star covered in bubbles, sipping a cocktail, maybe having a smoke

in there, and because she has got a lovely Marcel wave like mine,

doesn't want to get her hair wet, so is probably using this very cunning shoulder shower, look at that.

There's the main shower and there's the shoulder shower, so you don't get your 'do wet.

And you can also...

I love this! You can also summon the maid while you are in the bath and the valet as well.

Although the suite is very plain white in here, it's set off with veined marble to show that

this is no ordinary bathroom. It's clearly a place to enjoy yourself.

Now that the bathroom was established as place of relaxation and luxury, it was in the

private building boom of the 1930s that hot water bathrooms became standard in most middle-class homes.

For people living at the back-to-backs, however, it wouldn't be

until way into the 1950s that they too would finally follow suit.

And they decided to pull them all down.

The 1951 Census revealed that 37% of British households

still didn't have a plumbed-in bath, with 22% not even having a hot tap.

So Britain's slums were cleared to rehouse 3 million people in new flats, all with built-in bathrooms.

Well, Christopher and David, how do you like your new home?

Yes, thank you.

What do you particularly like about it?

We don't have to boil every drop of water now, whereas in the old days we did.

And also we have a toilet to ourselves now, whereas in the other

house we had to share one and also walk across the yard.

Now that bathroom technology had established itself,

the main thing to change over the last 50 years has been the styling.

In the 1960s, we got jacuzzis and shower chandeliers, fit for the sexual revolution.

In the 1970s James Bond age, we got coloured suites and solid gold taps and toilets.

A lovely Victorian wash hand basin...

In the 1980s, we went right back to the beginning with a rather questionable Victorian revival.

..With its rounded head, square foot, curved lip and ball and claw feet.

No matter what technological wizardry is available in the modern

bathroom today, what we want from it hasn't changed since the 1930s.

So I'm not going to turn that gorgeous 1930s bathroom down.

The bathroom's had a really remarkable journey.

150 years ago, it didn't even exist.

It's come from no room to one of the most luxurious and pleasurable rooms in the house.

Today bathrooms are about technology and gadgets. Everybody wants their own.

People are converting spare bedrooms into bathrooms

so everybody has got en suite, and that is because they are somehow essential to modern life.

They're places where you withdraw from the world, they are places where you pamper yourself, recover,

be your true self without anybody watching you for once, and they are

the one room in the whole house that still has a lock on the door.

Keep out.

Next time, the bedroom.

From the communal Medieval hall to the glamorous boudoir.

-A full English for you this morning.

-Marvellous.

I'll be seeing how the bedroom's development has affected our most private moments.

You're so like that person in that horror film who says that, and then everything goes horribly wrong!

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