So, who DID have a house with an outside toilet.


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We had one when we lived in a semi in Woodthorpe in the 40's/50's. It was part of the house though, you just had to walk down the yard. We did have one when we moved to Bleasby in '62 but there was an indoor one as well. An outside one is handy if you're gardening!

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And just to add to everyone's tales of outside toilets !!  We lived in a regular terrace house from mid 1960's that had at one time like all others have an outside toilet just at the end of the kitche

What a lovely name "Cesspit Sid" just love it (bet he used to come over just to take the pi$$)   Rog

You are the poshest person I know @LizzieM we didn't have any kind of toilet until I was 14 when I had my first tom tit 

Our bog where I  lived on Denton street, was at the bottom of a communal yard. Two streets backed onto it. The toilet block was at the bottom and it was six houses per toilet. There were no lights in the yard, so unless you had a torch you went in the dark. It was not a place to go in the depths of winter as they were always freezing up or getting blocked ! Every one had the regulation squares on a string. Some posh folks took their own toilet roll with them. Two families even used to padlock their door so nobody else could make use of their private loo.

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I was lucky in always having an indoor facility but I was very used to an outside bog at my granny's who lived on Occupation Road, Hucknall. The house is still there and the bog and coalhole buildings seem to be still there as well.

 

My other granny lived in Rempstone - she didn't have a toilet at all. Initially it was an earth closet (boards over a hole in the ground) but her son (my uncle) bought her an Elsan chemical toilet.

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We weren’t on mains drainage in Bleasby in 1962. We had a septic tank. It functioned perfectly and never required pumping out. It wasn’t until the 80’s that mains drainage came to the village and we were the last house on the lane to get it. I think there was a nominal connection fee of £50. Being over 100 yards from the lane our hook up cost was extremely good value. All the properties further along the lane have septic tanks but I never hear of any problems. The tanks act as a mini sewerage works with water coming out of the drain and the sewage decomposing through bacteriological action. Mains gas came much later. Prior to that we had a Calor Gas tank and solid fuel before that. We never had to draw water from the well though!

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Our house at Clifton had an outside toilet....as well as one inside - the whole bathroom with all fixtures and fittings.

 

As those houses were built in the 1950s they must've been some of the last to be built with an outside toilet.

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My grandparents lived on Grimston Road, Radford until 1976-77.

 

At that time the house still had no inside toilet or bathroom; only an outside toilet.....unchanged since it was built in the early 1900s.

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A friend of my mum who lived on Farnborough Road had an inside toilet right next to the front door. I thought that was very strange when I was a child as ours was upstairs.  Their bathroom was upstairs but I don't know whether there was another loo in there.  There was a coal space next to the side entrance door. Not sure whether there was an outside loo.

 

Must have been a pain having to go downstairs for the loo in the middle of the night if there wasn't one in the bathroom!

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My Aunt, who lived in an end house on Green Lane Clifton, didn't have an outside toilet, but she had a downstairs toilet, to the left as you entered the front door(which was on the side of the house, probably due to being an end house)? She also had one upstairs as part of the bathroom. I don't know if it was built like that or added later.  I don't remember it being any different, I only remember it from the 1960s.

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The friends who lived on Farnborough Road had an open fire for many years. They burned coke. I may have imagined this but I seem to remember being told they weren't allowed to burn ordinary house coal.  In later years, they switched to a gas fire. Maybe CT could clarify whether there was some restriction on the type of fuel permitted?

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9 minutes ago, Jill Sparrow said:

A friend of my mum who lived on Farnborough Road had an inside toilet right next to the front door.

 

7 minutes ago, carni said:

My Aunt, who lived in an end house on Green Lane Clifton, didn't have an outside toilet, but she had a downstairs toilet, to the left as you entered the front door

 

I know the kind of place you're both describing. Those houses were built later to a different style. We lived at the bottom end of Clifton in one of the earlier houses. The outside toilets were only in those earlier places such as ours; once you moved further up the estate to the 'modern' style, everything was indoors.

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I used to visit my Aunts for tea in around 1963/4 on Green Lane, and I can't remember the style of the house at that time, After I married in 1966, we didn't visit Nottingham very often for a few years. As the children grew up and we had a car we would visit  quite often up until she passed away in 2010 and I mainly remember the downstairs toilet from those years. It was very handy have two. Very Posh.

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Mum's friends lived at 394 Farnborough Road, opposite the school. I don't remember them living anywhere else although after their marriage in 1949, they lived with Noreen's parents in Sherwood until they were allocated a house. They would have been the first tenants of the property. Noreen's husband died in 1976 and a few years later, she bought the house and remained there until her death in 2009.

 

In later years, I believe there were some problematic tenants on parts of Farnborough Road but the section where Noreen lived had a very stable population who all seemed to have moved in around the same time and formed a positive little community.

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46 minutes ago, Jill Sparrow said:

The friends who lived on Farnborough Road had an open fire for many years. They burned coke. I may have imagined this but I seem to remember being told they weren't allowed to burn ordinary house coal.  In later years, they switched to a gas fire. Maybe CT could clarify whether there was some restriction on the type of fuel permitted?

Clifton was designated as a smokeless zone so only smokeless fuels could be burned.

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Well, look at that. My memory is not playing me up! Thanks Phil!  I hadn't thought about that for years and just remembered it when thinking about the house when I was a child. Most people had coal fires then and that was the only place I ever encountered coke fires.

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We had an outside loo, and to add insult we also had a tin bath. The loo was in our back yard, there were 10 houses in the  yard but each of us had a seperate loo. Every Saturday mum would scrub the loo which had a wooden seat, we had real toilet rolls, Not San Izel and not news paper on a nail but real toilet rolls even pink ones. The beauty of the wooden seat was in winter it was warm to your bum. Now in winter pipes would freez so dad would place a lit candle on a saucer, beleave it or not it worked. Unless it was windy (not the wind your thinking of) then the candle went out and it was luck that we did not have frozen pipes. 

 

Now I will tell you a story!!!! Don't let the master know I've told you.

When  master and I were courting (old fashion word)  mum and dad were giving me a birthday party, It was January and freezing out side, master had gone to the loo (no one had missed him but he had been gone for about 3/4 of an hour.  Now as I said the loo was in the yard and master sitting on the throne, heard foot steps comming down the yard, it was Brian, my brother, master called him at top of his voice, he was lucky as Brian heard him, what's up master?  there Is'ent any loo paper in here, Brain ran into the house grabbed a loo roll and went out side. It was only then we missed master on coming back into the house he was frozen stiff, but he did see the funny side.

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Even when I was living there I was aware that Clifton was a smokeless zone, but I didn't really understand - or bother about - what that actually meant.

 

When the houses were first built there was no central heating. They all had a fire place which used solid fuel (whatever that exactly was). We had a 'coal' fire in the living room until I was at least in my mid-teens, when it was replaced by a gas fire.

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There was as CT says no central heating and in winter ice formed on the inside of the windows. The fire in the lounge had a back boiler for hot water only, most days we had to run some water off because the tank in the airing cupboard was bouncing around when mam had the fire so hot the water boiled. She was a bugger for burning the back boiler, grate and side cheeks out fairly regularly too.

The 'coal house' was adjacent to the back door and it was my job to count the bags when we had a coke delivery. I stood on the backdoor step and the coalman would say "four", next bag would be "seven", next "nine" and so on...

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