Recently I have started taking baths. In these steamy wet hours I’ve started to think about what it means to wash, to maintain the cycle of clean to dirty, a cycle that never amounts to or accumulates to anything. Maintenance of our bodies, our possessions, our spaces, used to be a communal, ritualistic process. In the 17th century, villages would come together twice a year for a ‘great wash’, where the community would join in doing their laundry. Historically, people have embraced the ritual of the spring clean, seeing in a new season through domestic labour. Only recently has it been normal for all homes to have private bathrooms; across the world people have historically bathed together, out in the open in shared baths. I’m lucky to have a bath at all, let alone one that’s appealing enough to lie in. Most people I know are at the mercy of rickety, often mouldy showers with dreadful water pressure. In the hours I have to carry out the menial tasks of care, I lie in my small, unprecious bathroom - a room with no views in or out. I watch my body, distorted and abstracted in the reflection from the metal taps. I feel naked, removed from the dressings and roles of my daily life, and confused about how long to spend on this task that has no productive output or chronological end. The bath opens up a new intimacy with myself as a body, and I start to imagine what would happen if this intimacy could be collective. If there was an infrastructure for public washing; spaces across the city where I could go and melt and sweat and wrinkle up among fellow bodies, if it was the norm to go and celebrate the act of washing together.

In a world of imminent scarcity, of overconsumption and financial instability, making these services communal could offer us so much. Public amenities for washing could employ heat exchange systems and water recycling that homes don’t (currently) have the capacity for. But more than that, it could give us a practice, an observance to come together for. We’re living in a loneliness epidemic. Throughout the 20th century we have been pushed slowly indoors through the mod-cons and machine-like functionality of the home. We have washing machines, functional bathrooms, film streaming, everything available on-demand from within the house. We share our lives more than ever online, but still are increasingly disparate. I imagine what it would feel like to go to a public bath, to experience a bodily intimacy, not of showing the insides of my thoughts, but of feeling close through the body, pushing the limits of what we do in front of others. Healing a complex issue of loneliness with a simple, innate, archaic, human intimacy.

Like eating (a cliché of communality), bathing is about sharing an unavoidable human process. Both are about softening the threshold of the body; one through adding and taking away from the physical form, and the other through being in water, where bodies become entangled into a single mass. Daisy Hildyard writes of each person being possessed by two bodies; the first is our singular organism that we perceive to be ourselves, the second being the body that spans the whole world, emitting substances and affecting environments and taking in and breathing out. Through bathing together, the singularity of the first, enclosed body, is destabilised. We dirty a water that others sit in, and we absorb the water containing our fellow bather’s fluids. Joan Didion writes that ‘The water I will draw tomorrow from my tap in Malibu is today crossing the Mojave Desert from the Colorado River, and I like to think about exactly where that water is’. Bathing magnifies the intermingled messy truth that we are not individuals at all, but an inseparable ecology of life.

My first experience of the public bath was when I entered a bath house in Japan, where people have been using neighbourhood public baths since the 17th century. I was 20 years old and on a family holiday, and I was struck by the vulnerability of perching on a stool to wash in front of others from a tap, before getting in the shared bath. The bath itself I could accept, even the public nudity. The real intimacy came from the washing beforehand; letting other people, strangers, see this private act of care that we are all expected to do (indeed the societal norm tells us it would be repulsive not to be showering frequently), but not allowed to show. The first time we went to a bath house, I was surrounded by my mother and sisters, and didn’t want them to see me wash, afraid of letting them into a part of myself which I could never take back. But the next week, when my family had left and I was no longer watched by people who know me, I freely played with this state of unabashed intimacy. In this communal scrubbing there is a jolly companionship, a humbling admittance that no matter how lofty our intellect, at the end of the day we have to wash the sweat and dirt off our fleshy vessels.

Architect Mark Pimlott writes about the condition of the interior, the idea of interiority being a feeling that produces certain ways of being, ways of thinking and of acting, a state you enter as a reaction to an exterior metropolis. I recognise this as the way I am at home, where I feel hidden from the outside world. But could there be a space where we feel interiority together, as a group, with strangers? In today’s cities there are very few spaces we can spend time without consumption or self-improvement; we can go shopping, go to a restaurant, go to an exercise class, or a museum.
Where can we go just to be?

The space that most fits this ideal I am reaching for is the pub. In the pub you can spend little (or no) money, you aren’t watched or asked of, it’s a space to be. I picture those familiar images of Turkish baths, where groups of men lie around, damp, sweating and chatting. Somewhere between a pub and a church or mosque in the everyday ritual of it. When Turkish baths were first brought to the UK in the 19th century, they acted as a meeting place; a sort of working men’s club where men (and separately, women) could gather to converse and discuss. The pub and the bath both invite an unguarded closeness of body and looseness of thought. Perhaps steam and alcohol are alike in that they lower inhibition, and allow the users to enter a new state. The 1933 film ‘Where there’s life there’s soap’, a half hour instructive poem made by the public health department extolling the virtues of cleanliness, describes the Turkish bath with the line ‘In heated rooms with nothing on, you pass the time away’. They call for a slow, unproductive existence that today’s cities don’t allow for. Somewhere to come for togetherness, for being, a celebration of luxury, of comfort, of the body as it is (not as you wish it to be).

There is a pub I go to sometimes, near to my studio, called The Bath Hotel. A framed plan on the wall shows the layout of the neighbouring Glossop Road Baths, an old public bath opened in 1836. They were one of over 700 public baths built across the country as a response to the cholera epidemic, of which only 12 remain. The Glossop Road Baths now hold a luxury spa and a Wetherspoons. Learning about this feels like uncovering a secret heritage; just over a hundred years ago our cities were soaked with public bath offerings; a whole typology has been forgotten due to the rise of the private bathroom. I have become a sleuth, uncovering the mystery of the lost typology. In my detective work I come across a second type of bath. In the early 20th century pithead baths emerged as part of the miners’ social reform. In order to not bring the pervasive and dangerous coal dust home to be dealt with by overworked wives in overcrowded homes, many collieries opened a bath house for the workers. The miners would be sent through a production line of decontamination, stripping off their work clothes to be laundered on-site, taking a shower, and moving through to the clean area where their home clothes waited (and vice versa the next morning).

My journey into where the bathhouse went leaves me with a sense of loss. In losing the need to bathe in a public establishment, we have lost the feeling that our bodies and our domestic labour is valued. The wash houses and the pithead baths make a statement that domestic work, the work of care, maintenance and hygiene is essential labour, to be given time in the working day and space in the public sphere. Cleanliness isn’t a private problem, people deserve space and facilities to clean. Currently, bath houses for working people don’t exist, they’ve been replaced by the requirement for all dwellings to have bathrooms. Bathrooms that are often mouldy, badly ventilated, overused and underdesigned.

I think about where the bathhouse went as I swim lengths of the 50m pool near my flat. I climb out of the pool, and walk to the changing room dripping with chlorine and with goggle ring marks round my eyes. After swimming my body feels soft and malleable, dented from the pull of the swimming costume and saturated with the chemicals and grime of the water. I go to the changing room showers, feeling raw and young and sensitive. In the row of showerheads I wash myself in the company of two other women. We don’t speak, but we are together in performing our humanity, taking on the burden and the blessing of having a body. It would be nice if this responsibility, this bodily upkeep, didn’t need to be a private lonesome process. Wouldn’t it be fun to head down to the bath house in the evening with my friends? To celebrate in a ritual of washing, coming together to soak and lather and rinse in front of one another. To afford the act of bathing lengthy inefficiency. To, with water, cross contaminate the particles of our bodies, so we are not connecting across the chasm of being separate organisms, but becoming in a way one.