The bidet showers provision campaign germinates from the vision of our Vice President of Welfare and Community, Daniyal Ubaidullah, to reimagine our campuses as more inclusive and accessible spaces for our diverse student body.

For years,  King’s College London suffered from a lack of adequate provision of bidet showers or water-based solutions in toilets. This meant that thousands of our students who come from cultural, religious or ethnic backgrounds where the use of paper towel is not a norm, found it continuously challenging to access toilets on campus.

At the very start of his term in office, our Vice President started liaising with the Estates and Facilities Department of the university to turn this vision into a reality. This relationship in particular involved working closely with the university’s Director of Estates and Facilities, Nick O’Donnell.  Working with Nick helped not only in deciding on the breath of infrastructural change that would need to be made for the provision of the bidet showers across all campuses, but also brought to light further benefits of this infrastructure revamp. 

Hear more as Daniyal speaks with Nick O’Donnell, Director of Estates and Facilities at King's about the project, and see how your officers advocate for all students at King's to have a better academic experience with safe and inclusive spaces.

Alongside being a giant leap towards making campus spaces more inclusive and diversely accessible, a gradual switch to water-based solutions can offer a real answer to the problem of paper wastage. The KCL Estates and Facilities Department heavily focuses on including sustainable drainage into the very DNA of the bidet showers revamp, so that the new facilities are not only environmentally sustainable themselves but also help in cutting down on paper usage we make as an institution on the whole. With this step, we have moved further towards being both an inclusive and environmentally conscious institution, with values that are vital to the wider King’s community.

The installation of bidet showers across all our campuses is an ongoing process and will take months before fully materialising, and we will be posting regular updates about the project progress on this webpage.

We are also working closely with the KCL Estates and Facilities Department to bring up to speed campus maps and materials in order to accurately reflect the new bidet shower locations so that they are readily accessible by those in need. The progress on the bidet shower installation project as well as the future objectives as of March 2022 stand as follows:

• There will be bidet shower enabled toilets available at Strand campus, Waterloo campus, Guy’s campus and Denmark Hill campus in the next 2 years.
• They are already installed in:
  • G floor, New Hunts House, Guy’s Campus
  • 1 floor, New Hunts House, Guy’s Campus
  • 1 floor, Franklin-Wilkins Building, Waterloo Campus
  • 1 floor, IoPPN, Denmark Hill Campus
• 10% of new WC facilities as part of the Quad redevelopment, due to open in September 2022 will be bidet shower enabled.
• Bidet showers will be included as part of the WC facilities in new building projects moving forward, including at the LIHE building and St Thomas Campus which is under construction.
• Where possible bidet showers will be installed as part of appropriate refurbishment projects across the estate.
• KCLSU will work with the Department of Estates and Facilities to establish a standard design for bidet showers (using the new facilities at the Quad as a pilot) that meets all safety requirements that can then be used to make amendments across the estate.

We at KCLSU are proud to have led this initiative under Daniyal’s able leadership and hope that this is one of the many concrete changes that we will keep successfully advocating for.

Diverse. Green. Forever King’s.