Thurso Harbour Public Toilets
Community owned, community led.
The Thurso Harbour Public Toilets are an essential service and facilities for both locals and visitors to Thurso. Closed by Highland Council in 2017/18 we took them over in July 2020 and have been running them ever since with a volunteer run operation over the Summer months, opening, closing and cleaning the loos! We love our little loos and hope you do to, we aim to make them the best little loos in Scotland and the most sustainable ones. We have energy efficiency measures and only use environmentally friendly cleaning products in them. All of our waste is recycled and we even have sensor lights fitted. It does cost us to clean and maintain them. If you have used our loos or just want to support us, please consider making a donation to them.
We love our loos and we have made various improvements to them since taking them into community ownership.
Installing water saving automatic taps
Installing light sensors to make them more energy efficient
Improvements to the plumbing, they are old, with a tonne of issues!
Thanks to volunteers, painting the toilets to freshen them up.
Installing new signage including our fabulous door panels and Discover Thurso panels which through a clever QR code lead visitors to our Discover Thurso website crammed with information on things to do and see in the area.
Installing baby changing and fixing the all important radar lock on our accessible toilets.
Thurso Harbour Toilets Mural
In 2021 as part of our Discover Thurso Festival we worked with young people from Thurso Youth Club and Thurso Sea Cadets supported by Youth Highland to create our fabulous mural at the Thurso Harbour Public Toilets. Funded by Nature Scot through the Plunge In! Year of Coast & Waterways Community Funding we created a lifelong legacy for the festival and brightened up the loos and Thurso Harbour at the same time.
We are immensely proud of all the young people from Thurso who helped to create the mural, designing it and spending the day painting and completing it. It definitely draws a number of compliments and something to be proud of in the years to come.
You can see the young people (and helpers!) in action in the short video below showcasing our Discover Thurso Festival from 2021.
Accessibility
We are very grateful to be a member of the Highland Council Comfort Scheme.
Making our Thurso Harbour Public Toilets both accessible and inclusive has been very important to us. We do not have unisex toilets, we still retain the seperate gender toilets but are inclusive to those who may wish to use them.
We also have a fully accessible toilet with handrails which can be accessed via a radar lock even when the toilets are closed.
We also love our local language! Lassagies, Boyagies and Bairns are all part of the lingo up here in Thurso but we do provide a translation just in case you aren’t quite sure.
Get Involved
Would you like to get involved in helping us with the Thurso Harbour Public Toilets? We have different ways that you can get involved from simply supporting us with a donation to volunteering to help open and close the toilets during the Summer Months from April to end October, to supporting us by advertising in the toilets. Yes, we have come up with the novel idea of local businesses advertising in the toilets to help support our operational costs. What else do you have to read in the loo than the back of the door AND it encourages those lovely visitors to our town who may be stopping for the loo to come and explore our town.
Volunteering at the loos is very easy. We have a bank of volunteers who work on a shift basis and co-ordinate any issues or cover needed for your shift through a Whatsapp Group. The toilets are open from around 8am/9am daily (a little later is ok) until around 5pm/6pm. We are pretty flexible with the timings. Volunteers take turns to open or close however fits best around their lives. The closing shift does some light cleaning and emptying of the bins whereas the opening shift just needs to unlock the toilets. All accessed via a handy keybox for which you would be supplied the code. We give a full induction so any volunteers know what to expect. Staff and Board Members (who also take turns at opening, closing and cleaning) support everyone from the Whatsapp Group so if there are any issues you can get a quick response and know what to do or someone will jump in to help. If you feel that you can assist please visit our Volunteer section and get in touch.
Volunteer
We’ll be appealing for advertisers again for the Thurso Public Toilets in the Spring of 2023. We are very fortunate to have two clear areas for advertising in the toilets where we can host up to 12 A4 advertising frames each. Your advert for these would be placed in both spots, one in the Boyagies and one in the Lassagies Loos. In addition to this for an extra cost you can have prime position on the back of the toilet cubicle doors.
Advertising in the main toilets is £20 per month.
Advertising on the back of the toilet cubicle doors is £30 per month.
Advertising runs from April through to October.
If you are interested in advertising your local business in the toilets please get in touch with us using the form below and a member of staff or the Board will get back in touch with you. We’ve had great success with this and it both supports the loos to operate which benefits the town and gets visitors to visit you.