SWANSEA: Five portable loos in a car park, the seafront’s first public toilets since the Civic Centre shut

Caught short on Swansea beach this summer? You weren’t alone.

The busiest stretch of sand in the city has had no public toilet since December, when Swansea Civic Centre shut its doors and took the loos inside with it.

Nine months on, Swansea Council has found an answer: five portable cabins in a row, dropped into the upper car park beside the building.

They’re blue, they’re numbered, and one of them is marked accessible. They sit against the car park’s seaward wall, a minute’s walk from the prom.

Where the loos went, and why it took until August

The Civic Centre stopped letting the public through its front doors on 1 December, the day Y Storfa opened on Oxford Street and took the library, the archives and the housing desks with it.

Nobody thought about the toilets. Or if they did, nothing arrived in time for a heatwave summer that packed the beach outside.

Cyril Anderson, the council’s cabinet member for community, said the foreshore outside the building was “still well used, especially during the warmer summer months”, and that the loss of the toilets had “led to the council installing a number of toilets at the site which the public can access while out and about”.

He said the cabins would stay “while the regeneration plans for the Civic Centre progress”. On current form, that means years.

No Changing Places toilet, so here’s where the nearest ones are

None of the five is a Changing Places toilet, the bigger kind with a hoist and a changing bench that people with complex disabilities and their carers rely on.

The council says the nearest are at the Guildhall, the LC, Swansea bus station, the National Waterfront Museum and the Secret Beach Bar.

Proper toilets are in the plans, eventually

The permanent fix is on paper. The redevelopment application the council and Urban Splash lodged on 31 July includes public toilets, showers and changing rooms at beach level, open to anyone, not just people visiting the flats and aquarium above.

It’s in there because people asked for it. Better seafront toilets were among the loudest demands at the two public exhibitions this summer.

But the scheme is the first phase of a £750m, 20-year partnership, it still needs planning permission from the council’s own committee, and then it needs building. The £20m of UK Government money secured in March gets it started, not finished.

So for this summer, and probably the next one, the five cabins in the car park are what the seafront has got.

If the queue’s too long, the LC is five minutes east along the prom.