Spitting in public: disgusting and antisocial – or a great British tradition? - The Guardian

Study the visual evidence and the object in question looks like a marker: not round enough to be a coin, but similarly sized and solid-looking. Greyish white, it straddles the boundary between the yellow line of the road and the Tarmac. Really, it looks nothing like spit – but now it's famous spit. Possibly even celebrated spit. For this gobule of saliva was photographed, probably by the police's community support officer, at the scene in Leyton, east London, and submited as part of 18-year-old Khasheem Kiah Thomas's court summons. Along with another man, Zilvinus Vitkas, Thomas last week became the first person to be successfully prosecuted by a council in England for spitting in public, when Thames magistrates court endorsed Waltham Forest council's view that spitting was a sub-genre of litter.

But is spit litter, and is it even a health hazard? To Ross Coomber, professor of sociology at Plymouth University, spit is a many-faceted thing. He is conducting an international spitting survey and spent the summer travelling in Mumbai, Kuala Lumpur, Jakarta, Tokyo, Seoul and Shanghai, comparing the public spitting habits of different nations. He found that "the three most significant spitting nations are India, South Korea and China". (For would-be students of spit, the spitting in Mumbai was mainly connected to the chewing of betel nut, in South Korea it was closely linked to smoking, and in China to a distaste for swallowing.) In comparison, he says, spitting in the UK is not as prevalent as people tend to believe. "What we are seeing is an exaggerated response to a moderate problem." For Coomber, attitudes to spitting are based upon "an argument about morality, about what people would prefer to see". He says that links between "spitting on the ground and public health [are] almost unevidenced".

John Middleton, vice-president of the Faculty of Public Health, would not go that far. "The actual risk to other people in the current circumstances may be very small but it does represent something unnecessary and unpleasant. There are reasons for believing that there is a low level of risk to public health [in terms of] communicable viruses and bacteria – respiratory viruses, colds." He cites the possibility of someone treading on spit and then taking their shoes off later; or someone putting spit-addled shoes on the bus seat, and another passenger putting their hand on the seat. Middleton worries that he "wouldn't want to overstate the health consequences". Perhaps Coomber is right: this is scarcely about health at all. Waltham Forest council appears to concur: on its website it describes spitting as "antisocial and dirty", "disgusting and unacceptable", but there is no mention of health risks.

Coomber, who used to spit in public as a teenager in south-east London, says he "doesn't like" spitting, but points out that, historically, Britain is a nation of spitters. "There are reports of people spitting in parliament right up to the end of the 19th century. I like to remind people that we were still building pubs in the 1930s with spitting troughs at the bottom of the bar." Punks gobbed at bands on stage. Sports stars spit: cricketers too. People spit when they are cycling or running. Some might practise what Coomber calls "socially responsive spitting" – spitting when no one is there to see it. Perhaps public spitting is a more ingrained part of British culture than people like to admit. Whether you want to celebrate that is a question only of taste.