Suffolks Sake.

Just like poor, lovely George Michael, we’ve all found ourselves in an unfortunate toilet situation at some point. Whether it be running out of paper at a crucial moment, accidentally splashing tap water on your trousers, pissing on your own shoes or pebble-dashing the walls, I’m here to tell you that bad things can happen to even the best of us so don’t feel embarrassed if you’ve left a toilet in worse shape than you were when you entered it, as long as you tried to tidy up after yourself, naturally. There is, I am almost certain, a direct correlation between the quality of the toilet area and the luck you have when you’re in there. A good, clean toilet or bathroom encourages better behaviour and often signals you are experiencing a wider environment that fosters common sense and consideration towards others. On the other hand, if you find yourself needing to use the toilet in a scrap yard or a crack den then it’s much less likely that you’ll be compelled to follow simple domestic rules such as: “Please Leave This Toilet As You Would Wish To Find It” or “If You Sprinkle When You Tinkle, Be A Sweetie, Wipe The Seatie”. Indeed, I suspect (because I have never been in one) that it would be quite hard to make the toilet in a crack den all that much worse, given that it will probably already be harbouring a viscous broth of troubling faeces, used needles, half a copy of an Auto-Trader, a very full and very un-flushable nappy and a pair of human thumbs. On reflection I regret ever bringing George Michael into all this. Sorry George, you deserve better.

And sometimes a toilet takes you quite by surprise. Look at Ipswich, for instance. I haven’t been to Ipswich for a long, long time. When I was in my teens I got the train there to attend a careers day all about the police force. I shudder to think just how poor a police officer I would have made. I would have been ok working on the phones or helping an old lady find her dog in the park or handing out lollies at a Down’s Syndrome charity fete, but faced with the sharper end of the wedge – rioting, bank robbers, strip searches, mass murderers, sex trafficking, trying to identify the owner of a pair of detached thumbs found in a crack den toilet, and so on – I know I would have struggled. On top of that I have poor eyesight and weak arms (we could go into a long list of my other failings but that would be to divert from the point). But there I was, in grey slacks, a navy blue double breasted jacket and a pair of shiny Clarks, walking along a wide, tree lined and rather pleasant road towards what must have been a hotel or conference centre so that I could be safely talked out of joining the police force, for the greater good of the nation. And I also remembered thinking: Ipswich doesn’t seem too shabby, maybe it would be a good idea to come back another time. I was wrong.

I’m sorry to all Gippeswykians (that’s what they’re called, feel free to check) in advance, but if you didn’t already know you appear to live in a huge open air toilet. A dump. An end of the road, bottom of the barrel, bargain basement, run down seaside public convenience shithole. Even the good bits are awful and the awful bits are beyond words. It doesn’t have charm or character or even something as simple as a good view; if someone dropped you into the city centre on a whim you could literally spend the rest of your life turning on a sixpence just waiting for something nice to look at. Sure it has its historical provenance and cultural heritage but it seems these have been gradually overpowered and murkily enveloped by a long series of bad decisions by councillors and town planners so desperately underqualified they probably couldn’t be trusted to provide a steady supply of urine for a tanner’s yard. Of course, they can’t be held solely responsible, but when you start tinkering with city centres you have to be careful because it doesn’t take much for a tinkle to turn into a sprinkle, a sprinkle into a gush and before you know it the whole place is covered in shit.

To be frank there are just too many bad things to mention but I should give a shout out to some of the lowlights. The “historic” olde town square which has been fitted with a mini fountain park so fat children can get a free shower in their underpants while their parents watch, uncaring, from a distance. A promising restaurant called The Botanist, which is let down by an outside eating area that seems to double up as a pigeon lavatory. The Buttermarket shopping and entertainment centre which was clearly built before anyone knew how to fill it or when that might happen; on the ground floor the only places open were TK Maxx, New Look and a Prezzo. The other, older, even more depressing Sailmakers shopping centre; if it had been a person it would have been a leaking corpse. A little olde shopping street which once would have been crammed with butchered animals, drunk sailors, sedan chairs and prostitutes but is now crammed with bad cafes, questionable craft shops and the empty facades of business ideas so bad they didn’t even need Covid to fall flat on their faces after six desperate months of shockingly low footfall. The worlds largest concentration of foul smelling charity shops, each exhaling their own particular odour from the “Dead and Buried” range. The familiar boarded up mammoth carcass of a Debenhams. I could go on but I won’t – when the shiniest highlights are a Primark and a Revolution nightclub you know you have a problem.

But the biggest worry of all is the filth. Ipswich is dirty. The streets are labelled extensively with the stains you get from years of abuse and neglect. Every puddle of vomit telling its own grotty little story. Every sun-dried brown splash and every ghost of trodden down gum and every scrawled, long redundant, workman’s measurement and every battered, overflowing bin and every bag of refuse dumped in shop doorways because, well, its just easier, isn’t it? It may as well still be medieval, with an open sewer running through the middle of the street and buckets of excrement flying out of second storey windows at random moments, like some dreadful sort of lottery where everyone is a loser. And while some of this is down to bad management the rest is down to the people of Ipswich, because if they all cared just a little bit more about the city where they live and how it looks then those marks and stains, those tossed away coffee cups and remnants of a bad night out wouldn’t be quite so obvious. Ipswich is therefore just a victim of its occupants, as is the fate of every toilet on the planet. Last year I wrote about the failings of Southampton, but to be honest Ipswich makes Southampton look like Dubai, and that isn’t anything to be proud of. It also neatly (or rather not) serves as a model answer to the question: what’s gone wrong with Britain’s cities. Ipswich may have many wonderful things to bark about but the day I went back I couldn’t see any of them, and it also seems that her citizens have unanimously and regularly chosen not to leave it as they would like to find it. Which is a pity.

G B Burton. 14.08.2025