Toilet Entrances, Shaftsbury Square, Belfast, County Antrim

Underground public toilet entrances built between 1931 and 1938, located at Shaftesbury Square where Dublin Road and Great Victoria Street meet. Now disused.

The structure comprises a pair of free-standing railed underground entrances arranged on an east-west axis, with the ladies' facility to the west and the gents' to the east. Each entrance is rectangular in plan and built of moulded Portland limestone ashlar plinth walls with wrought-iron railings rising from the plinth. The railings are simple in design with intermittent square panels. An arched entrance gate at one end and a semi-circular opposing end define each structure. Matching wrought-iron arches frame the gates, each originally mounted with a pendant iron sign featuring Greek key embellished brackets and cut-out lettering—the ladies' entrance retains its sign reading "LADIES", while the gents' sign is missing. The lettering was possibly formerly lit from within. Beyond each gate, a series of concrete steps with non-slip treads lead underground, supported by a bronze handrail on tiled walls. The interior walls were finished with white enamelled brickwork, and floors with terrazzo tiles.

The underground structure was designed with brickwork walls on reinforced concrete foundations, roofed with reinforced concrete on steel beams. At footpath level it was covered with limmer rock asphalt, with the entire structure encased in a limmer rock asphalt envelope. Pavement lights and ventilators ventilate the roof. Sewage was lifted by electric pump. The original design intended to plant shrubs or trees around the surface entrances to relieve the bareness of the position and enhance the site amenities.

The lavatories were built in response to inadequate public convenience provision in this major traffic junction. An existing public urinal in the vicinity was deemed wholly inadequate and in poor condition. Although the city surveyor preferred an above-ground facility from a health perspective, no suitable site could be found, and the location on a triangle of land beneath Shaftesbury Square was selected to avoid impeding traffic. The proposal was approved in 1930 when Belfast County Borough Council applied for a loan of £6,000 from the Ministry of Home Affairs for Northern Ireland.

The removal of the decorative ironwork above ground has substantially diminished the architectural interest of these rare survivors of 1930s public sanitary infrastructure. By 2011, the wrought-iron railings remained intact. However, by July 2014, hoardings had been erected around the entire perimeter of both entrances, and the railings had been entirely cut off and removed from the base plinth upwards.