Helle's toilet: 12th-century three-person loo seat goes on display

Conservator Luisa Duarte working on the 12th-century toilet seat. 

Photograph: David Levene/The Guardian

Archaeologists know the names of the owners of the building where plank of oak sat
A rare 12th-century toilet seat built to accommodate three users at once is to go on display for the first time at the Museum of London Docklands.

Nine hundred years after the roughly carved plank of oak was first placed over a cesspit near a tributary of the Thames, it will form the centrepiece of an exhibition about the capital’s “secret” rivers.

The strikingly well preserved seat, still showing the axe marks where its three rough holes were cut, once sat behind a mixed commercial and residential tenement building on what is now Ludgate Hill, near St Paul’s Cathedral, on land that in the mid-1100s would have been a small island in the river Fleet.

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