Charging to spend a penny '˜doesn't add up'

It came after officers suggested that the city’s two remaining Victorian toilets, in Queen Victoria Square and Nelson Street, currently free, could partly pay for their own upkeep.

Both are in areas which should be thronging with visitors next year when the city is the UK’s City of Culture.

Coun Martin Mancey said: “When we were looking at potential savings for the budget next year officers came up with a lot of suggestions - one of which was this one, which Cabinet members dismissed out of hand.

“Apart from the fact that it wouldn’t be welcoming in terms of lots of visitors coming to the city in 2017, it wouldn’t be popular with local people who don’t have much in the way of public toilet provision left in the city.”

The Queen Victoria Square toilets - used by 187,000 people a year - would have raised £37,500 and Nelson Street another £7,500.

But Coun Mancey said the cost of putting in the equipment, vandalism and staffing would make it not worthwhile.

There have been calls for the city to make a feature of its toilets - espcially the famous turn-of-the-century men’s urinal under the King Billy statue in Market Place - which reputedly once had goldfish swimming in its marble and glass cisterns. The listed loo has eight slate stalls and four cubicles with Ionic columns. Adam Fowler, of the City of Hull & Humber Environment Forum, thinks restricted opening would be good at key events in 2017: “It is quirky things like that give an insight into a city’s cultural history.”

But Coun Mancey said the King Billy loos were problematic because of their position in the middle of a busy road, apart from the significant expense of doing them up. They are looking instead to extend opening hours at the city’s current toilets and bringing in additional temporary loos at main events.