Station Street had a public toilet at either end: one underneath the old, bombed out market hall the other a Victorian underground lavatory which was known amongst the men who used it to pick up as the Silver Slipper after the ballet shop sign just opposite.
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Public lavatories nearby and across the city centre meanwhile provided a free alternative to the back to backs privies – with some further homoerotic possibilities thrown in (for the men at least). The opportunities for homoerotic flirtation and more were apparently legion there – and a gay memory project in the city suggests they gained some notoriety in the 1950s and 1960s for precisely that reason. They were completed in 1852 (the first of 14 established by the Birmingham Public Baths Committee), enlarged and improved in 1930, and finally closed in 1977 – ten years after the back to backs had been declared unfit for human habitation. Here for those with a first- or second-class entry fee to spare there were private bath cubicles together with gender segregated swimming pools and Turkish baths. Those functions could be carried out in shared privies in the courtyard, in the basic washroom, or else in the public baths around the corner in Kent Street. These houses were amongst the 15% of Birmingham households in 1961 to have no independent toilet and the 30% that didn’t have their own bath or shower. All this within ten minutes walk of our back to backs. Just beyond was Birmingham Station presented further possibilities for queer encounters – with people, at one remove from home and perhaps with a little time to spare, passing through and in and out of the city. Perhaps, for example, amongst the actors and theatrical types in the bar at the Hippodrome Theatre (from 1895) and rough pubs further down Hurst Street or the (old) Repertory Theatre on nearby Station Street from 1913 – 1971 (when it moved to a new building on Broad Street). Queer adventuring and socialising – like socialising and courting more broadly – was best or more easily conducted elsewhere for back to back residents. There were different queer dynamics here to those experienced by wealthier men and women with a more privileged access to private space (though since live-in servants were common until the interwar period, there might be a good deal of reliance on their discretion even in those larger houses). It is likely that there were some blind eyes turned but fear of gossip, censure or worse would have made caution and self policing at home imperative. Shared rooms and beds might have presented some opportunities but queer goings on would not have gone unnoticed. Having neighbours on three sides meanwhile made the possibility of being overheard very real and living so cheek by jowl meant everyone was potentially under close observation. Birmingham Back to Backs on Inge Street (Photo Nathan Reading)
There was barely any privacy within these homes: census returns show multiple occupancy in the 19 th and 20 th centuries, with families and sometimes also lodgers in Birmingham as a whole in 1961 there was still an average of 1.5 per room (based on all rooms in a household and not only bedrooms).
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These houses were small – one ground floor plus one or two upper floor rooms. Looking at working-class housing like the Victorian back to backs at 50–54 Inge Street and 55–63 Hurst Street in central Birmingham suggests why. They crop up in these contexts more often than those of their middle- and upper-class counterparts because they were arrested more often. Working-class urban queer lives before the 1970s emerge most frequently through court cases and resulting press reports.