WHEN Hugh Murray heard of plans to install public toilets in Silver Street, York, he had a strange sense of dj loo.

The council plans to turn Splash Palace in Parliament Street - condemned as a smelly mess by an Evening Press correspondent - into a visitor's centre.

The public toilets would be moved to a property in Silver Street, once it has been vacated by the electricity substation there.

An innovative solution? Well, nothing much is new in York.

Before anyone had heard of electricity substations, the property had been used as... a public toilet.

Formerly home to York's first police station, in 1896 the Silver Street premises were turned into three lock-up shops and the first ladies' lavatory in the city. Users had to go through an attendant's room to the inner sanctum, which boasted three WCs and three washbasins. All this is chronicled in Hugh's unsurpassed history of local public conveniences, Where To Go In York (still on sale in good bookshops).

For the first couple of months, the original ladies was only open on Saturdays. "However, it was wisely decided that, as women's needs were not confined to just one day a week, it should, like the facilities for men, be open every day," Hugh wrote.

On the opposite side of the street was a urinal, and the users were causing a nuisance to women visiting their new loo, according to a letter from the caretaker, Mrs Dawson. Eventually a new underground gents was built in Silver Street and they took to it like a duck to water. By 1913 it had become their most popular calling point. The ladies loo lasted until 1930... when it was needed for an electricity substation.

WELL done for taking those tough financial decisions, City of York Council. As part of its cutbacks, it plans to end its grant to Stagecoach Youth Theatre by 2009. That would have no impact at all, apart from consigning to history a remarkable artistic and social enterprise that has benefited countless York children of different ages and backgrounds.

Hardly worth keeping, when scrapping the grant would save the council a massive £9,500 a year.

To put that in context, it is:

0.0031 of the council's spend on services

1.68 per cent of councillors' total allowances

1.9 per cent of the council money wasted on maintaining an empty Barbican Centre up until last October

9.5 per cent of the amount of unpaid rents written off by the city council.

TO our list of MPs with a York University qualification, we must add one-and-a-half names from the past.

Even before he became the Tory member for Billericay, Harvey Proctor was a political animal. As a leader of the York University Student Conservatives, he broadcast political messages on North Yorkshire pirate station Radio 270. He gained a degree in history from the university in 1969, but a promising political career was cut short by a sex scandal in 1987.

The half is Christine Hamilton - other half of Neil "Cash For Questions" Hamilton, another Tory MP whose life in the House of Commons was shortened by scandal.

So York University wasn't always a haven for Lefties...

Updated: 08:55 Wednesday, January 11, 2006