Forget the club, I can’t wait to return to the camaraderie of the ladies toilets

As nightclubs reopen almost a year and a half after they were ordered to shut, women tell Saman Javed why they are most looking forward to the return of the ladies bathroom

Women on a night out (Shutterstock / Roman Samborskyi)

Bella James* had just finished an eight hour shift and went straight to pre-drinks with friends. The 22-year-old admits she had one or two drinks too many. Feeling sick on the way to the venue, she remembers the blurred vision, seeing three of her Uber driver, and barely making it down the steps into the club.

“I made a bee-line straight to the girls’ toilets to spew. I was in a bad way,” she says. Finding herself alone, on the cubicle floor, all she could think about was how the new dress she had put on hours before was ruined. “And then I saw a manicured hand slip underneath the cubicle to latch onto mine and tell me everything was going to be okay.

“The situation was objectively funny but very wholesome, and it reminded me of the specific female unity that shows itself when we are drunk and sometimes don’t feel like we are in a safe space,” she says.

Public spaces where women feel entirely safe can be few and far between: a 2019 report by the Trades Union Congress found one in two women have been sexually harassed at work. Survey data from reviews site FitRated found 71 per cent of women have had an uncomfortable interaction at the gym, and a YouGov survey last year found that 55 per cent of women in London have been a victim of some form of sexual behaviour by a stranger on public transport.

Enter the women’s bathroom, a place of camaraderie and bonding. Whether it’s at the giant loos in Wetherspoons (and those central fountain-style sinks), the toilets at crowded train stations or at your favourite club, complete with a friendly attendant who has lollipops, hair grips and hairspray on hand, the feeling of the ladies bathrooms is unmatched.

Earlier this year, TikTok creator Rosie Lou went viral after she made a video perfectly encapsulating a conversation between two drunk women in the ladies toilets. The video, titled, “Point of view: you meet her in the club toilets,” shows Rosie as the intoxicated yet supportive girl we’ve all met, who just found someone crying over their boyfriend.

I saw a manicured hand slip underneath the cubicle to latch onto mine and tell me everything was going to be okay.

But on 23 March 2020, Boris Johnson enacted a nationwide lockdown. With the lockdown, came the closure of nightclubs, which, unlike other social spaces, have not been allowed to reopen, contributing to widespread difficulties for the nightlife industry. Until now. As well as reopening to save jobs, livelihoods, and the dwindling footprint of the club in our cities - the number of clubs had dropped by a fifth in one year even before Covid - I am glad they are reopening for the bathrooms.

A night out at a club has many highlights; there’s getting ready with friends, pre-drinking in the taxi, the strangers you meet in the smoking area, but there’s nothing quite like the girls you meet in the bathroom. “Those interactions with kind strangers are something that a lot of people, including myself, have been missing since Covid,” Bella says.

For Joss Prior, 45, these girls provided a sense of safety on her first Pride since she transitioned to living as a trans woman. Her friends had chosen a club where people were mostly cisgender and heterosexual, leaving Joss feeling apprehensive about how she might be received. This was heightened when she found herself alone in a long queue for the toilets.

“I’d usually got on fine using women’s spaces, but you do have that fear in the back of your mind, [that] someone could kick-off on and decide I shouldn’t be there,” she says. Feeling mortified, Joss recalls trying to be “inconspicuous” and make herself “as small as possible”, that is until the DJ started playing Britney Spears.

“Toxic came over the speakers and suddenly all the women in the queue came alive. Within seconds we were all in a circle singing full blast. At one point, a girl flared her eyes at me and smiled, It was obvious she clocked me as trans. She put one of her arms around me, and we all danced together until the queue went down,” she says. It became the highlight of the night and she left the toilets beaming.

Like Joss and Bella, most women have a story or two of the time a woman they did not know showed them kindness in a bathroom. But for some, these moments were the beginning of life-long friendships rather than one night of fun with strangers. Abbey Rose, 24, first met Harjyot in the bathroom of a bar, where she looked “alone and lost”.

Harjyot’s friends had gone home for the night leaving her by herself. Both quite drunk, the pair stumbled into the same toilet cubicle, where they bonded over their mutual interest in tarot readings. “I think we both instantly knew that we were meant to meet that night. We just clicked, and it felt so comfortable,” she says.

I think we both instantly knew that we were meant to meet that night. We just clicked, and it felt so comfortable.

The pair exchanged Instagrams and continued to talk daily. Despite a 40-minute distance between them, they still meet up regularly and Abbey regards her as one of her closest friends. Now, they go to clubs together, making sure not to leave without one another. “I’ve learnt so much about myself since we met. She pulls me up on a lot and brings me down to earth when I float away. [I’m] so thankful I met her!” she says.

And for Nadia Wyatt*, 23, life recently came full circle in the ladies toilets of a Manchester bar. She realised the woman she was consoling was actually crying over the same man she had dated (and cried about). “She said she was having boy troubles and I was like ‘oh f*** him, don’t cry and all the usual stuff, and then she mentioned his name,” she says. “I struggled to hold back the laughter of knowing he is still a horrible demon and left the bathroom.”

Nadia could not bear to tell a stranger that she too, had cried over the same boy in the same bathroom two years prior. “Instead, I went absolutely sprinting back out to my friends and we raised a tequila in her honour,” she says.

As coronavirus restrictions have eased, various aspects of our social lives have slowly returned. Dinners with grandparents; trips to the cinema; days spent shopping and drinks at the bar with friends are now possible. But as nightclubs prepare to reopen, it is these fleeting, yet meaningful displays of kindness between women which I most look forward to.

*Some names have been changed to protect their privacy.