By John O’Hare 

One of Dunedin’s more modest heritage buildings has earned itself a wee bit of recognition.

Our Southern team are excited to include the Manor Place Conveniences on the New Zealand heritage list as a Category 2 historic place. The classification formally identifies the 111-year-old octagonal building as a place of heritage significance.  

“Believe it or not, the current Manor Place Conveniences are not the original public toilets on this site,” says Heritage New Zealand Pouhere Taonga Heritage Assessment Advisor Alison Breese – the self-described ‘Loo Lady’ – who undertook research of the building for the listing.  

“The toilets were built in 1912 to replace an existing block located on the same site.” 

It seems that Dunedin residents have been able to use the facilities on this site since some of the earliest years of the city’s establishment – 1876 to be precise. However, it only catered to Dunedin men, as the Conveniences only consisted of urinals.  

“Dunedin women were very poorly served for public conveniences. Even in the early 1900s – a quarter of a century after the first iteration of the Manor Place Conveniences had been built – there were only two public toilets for women; one at the St Clair Beach Tramways building and the other being the women’s underground conveniences at the Octagon,” says Alison.  

The lack of public facilities for women reflected a much wider issue. Recognising the importance of access to public facilities for women to take their rightful place in wider society, women around the world at the time lobbied for better access to public facilities. 

“In England, this was even a platform of the suffrage movement. Here in Dunedin things were still a little primitive, reinforcing the prevailing sense that women were unwanted and unassimilated to the public environment. That would change in time however.” 

In the meantime, the Manor Place Reserve had built a reputation as being the sort of place to avoid at all costs. The area was really a Reserve in name only and was used instead for – among other things – stacking timber and the occasional travelling circus performance.  

Raised footpaths, kerbing and channeling had been installed in 1876 to help address some of its sanitation problems though it would take more than these measures to eliminate people’s reservations about the Reserve.  

One correspondent complained in a letter to the Editor that the council had turned the Reserve “into a supplementary manure depot, great heaps of filth, consisting mainly of dead dogs and cats, and kerosene tins and a series of pools of stagnant water of a greenish hue.”  

Clearly, the feeling was that the Council could do a little bit better with its sanitation. Some relief came with the construction of the first Manor Place urinals in the mid-1870s. 

“The reserve itself remained a ‘colourful’ part of Dunedin for some years after, however, though change came in the form of the Dunedin and Suburban Reserves Conservation Society who undertook to develop the reserve into a garden in 1895,” says Alison.  

“The area was planted with trees and flowers, with plans and a space laid out for what was the high point of achievement for all public spaces at the time – a band stand.” 

With its new-found transformation from public embarrassment to pleasant garden space, the area was at last starting to live up to its public reserve status. Sadly, however, the public conveniences were letting the side down, and the air soon resounded again with the cry of disappointed ratepayers.  

“This time a petition was organised and signed by concerned neighbouring residents and ratepayers complaining about the state of the “old urinal” on Manor Place – as well as the urinal’s aesthetics within the cityscape and its offensiveness to members of the public,” says Alison.  

“Given its proximity to two of the city’s reserves and the proposed upgrade for the Oval Reserve, the group called for a new underground convenience to be built for both sexes.”  

The petition was presented to the Council in 1912, who then agreed to dip into a fund allocated in 1909 for building underground conveniences. The fund was hardly flush – £263.4.11 to be exact – but it was enough to build an above-ground convenience, though, again, for men only. 

In the process of council consent and approval, a brief note on the back of a Minute Paper discussing the urinal design records the words ‘Octagon shape as altered’ – but nobody really knows why.  

According to Alison, “There is no further mention of why it was designed in this shape other than that it stood within the site of the previous urinal. It’s possible that it was designed, in a fit of whimsy, to mirror the city’s Octagon but this is unknown. The original contract has not survived in the local authority archives.” 

As well as its unconventionally shaped eight-walled construction, the new conveniences also boasted state-of-the-art porcelain urinals made by Twyfords in England. Constructed from fireclay, the Twyfords stoneware incorporated the latest technology from the company’s Adamant range. 

In 1919 the council’s City Engineer pronounced the Manor Place structure, “an object of beauty draped as it is in lovely native shrubs” – though originally the foliage was planted to act as a screen to provide at least some privacy for patrons. The trees and plants were cut back to accommodate the flash new premises.  

Vandalism as well as general deterioration reduced the functionality of the conveniences over the years. The public toilets narrowly escaped demolition in 1976, though they managed to survive when they were used exclusively by Dunedin City Council Transport bus drivers.  

Eventually the doors to the conveniences were bricked up – only to be re-opened briefly for a heritage assessment in 2017.  

“The Manor Place Conveniences has become a small but prominent Dunedin City landmark and is unique in New Zealand because of its original interior, its distinctive octagonal form and as a rare example of an early 20th Century urinal,” says Alison.  

“It is a good example of how heritage is not always decorative. Humble heritage like the Manor Place Conveniences is still an important part of the story of Dunedin however and the history of public sanitation in New Zealand.”