For Your Convenience

A facsimile guide to the Gents Loos of London, with map endpapers, published originally in 1937 by Routledge. Two members of a Gentleman’s Club begin a conversation over a copy of the Sanitary World and Drainage Observer. The discussion turns to where "relief" may be obtained after drinking tea or lager when walking the streets of London. We are told that the "places that have no attendants afford excellent rendezvous to people who wish to meet out of doors and yet escape the eye of the Busy (police)." The book could be read at as an entertaining, straightforward guide to London’s public conveniences but yet to our more skeptical eye it is patently a guide to where men could meet like-minded men in an era when homosexuality was illegal. It remains a classic whether taken at face value or not.

Paul Pry was the pseudonym of Thomas Burke, author of the highly-acclaimed Limehouse Nights and Nights in Town. Several of his short stories became films directed by D. W. Griffith. He died in London in 1945.