A Tudor style toilet in central London.
On Fitzrovia's Riding House Street you may have clocked the building with the golden/green Art & Crafts style mosaic sign for gas and electrical engineers T.J Boulting & Sons. As signage for electricians go, this is surely some of the finest, and arguably T.J. Boulting was one of the best engineers of his day too. Gas and electric aside, he also fitted the first flushing toilet at Windsor Castle — before Thomas Crapper got there. A right Handy Andy.
These days, the Fitzrovia building houses a modern art gallery, which happily pays tribute to the previous tenant by using his name wholesale: it is the TJ Boulting gallery.
Here you can peruse all kinds of avant garde art (on our visit there was a painting of an egg that'd had an actual egg hurled at it). But the thing to see here is the toilet — a work of art in its own right. Created by the artist Rachael Haines in 2018, the toilet takes its cue from the half-timbering style of Tudor times. But —and here's the really clever bit — the whole effect is created using black gaffer tape.
Says Haines "There was something about the blackness of gaffer tape and the straight lines that appealed to me when I was thinking how I could respond to an image of a Tudor house I had found years before in a book. The texture of the gaffer tape reminded me more and more of the surface of wood. Air bubbles would affect the surface of the tape and it would sometimes peel at the edges and fray. Tudor seemed to take on a life of its own, breathing and shifting with time."
This isn't the only 'Tudor' installation Haines created in London; previous ones have been at bars and galleries including Transition Gallery and Dream Bag Jaguar Shoes. But this Tudor toilet is a little bit special. Here's hoping it sticks around a few more years yet.
We should point out that this is NOT a public toilet. But if you're in the area, fancy browsing the gallery, and ask the staff nicely, hopefully they'll let you see their gaffer tape Tudor toilet.
Tudor toilet, T.J Boulting gallery, Riding House Street, Fitzrovia
