From public good to private provision: The role of hospitality workers in gatekeeping toilet access

Public toilet closures in the UK, driven by austerity, have led to increasing reliance upon private or commercial facilities, such as toilets in bars and cafes. The extra labour required to maintain and monitor these toilets became especially visible under COVID-19 restrictions. This article shares reflections from a project exploring the impact of additional cleaning and monitoring of customer toilets in the hospitality sector during the pandemic. We use in-depth sociological narratives from two hospitality workers to explore their role as ‘gatekeepers’ in maintaining toilet spaces and facilitating access to essential provisions. We argue that council toilet closures have turned the hospitality sector into social infrastructure, whereby some workers see themselves as providing essential welfare facilities, while others struggle to decide who should be granted access to customer toilets and find that monitoring access creates a risk of abuse. Using street-level bureaucracy theory, we show how this gatekeeper role puts the onus on hospitality workers to make difficult, individualised decisions and shifts attention from the urgent need for unquestionable access to free, publicly funded toilets.