While it is a laudable aim to try to attract day trippers to Halstead, the chief obstacle is the toilets, or rather the lack of them.
When people get off a coach, having travelled for anything up to two hours, quite a number of them look for public toilets before starting to visit places of interest.
In Halstead, all we have are the very inadequate toilets by the public gardens, which leave much to be desired, to put it mildly.
I am puzzled by the suggestion by the chamber of trade chairman that “an increase in public toilets would help but we need to be utilising all the different cafes and pubs in the town”.
Surely she is not suggesting that day trippers should be encouraged to use the toilet facilities at such places when they arrive.
Normally, toilet facilities in pubs and cafes are exclusively for the use of customers.
In any case, most pubs and cafes are not immediately near the place where coaches would park.
Unfortunately, the public toilets in Sainsbury’s car park were allowed to fall into disrepair, with apparently no money being available to refurbish them.
The result is that day trippers cannot reasonably be expected to visit our town in numbers when we cannot provide them with decent public toilet facilities.
Geoff Willis
North Mill Place, Halstead
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