How the Laundrette Became a Staple Space for Working Class Artists

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The cultural historian Edwina Atlee writes that when modern laundrettes were first established in Britain, they quickly became known as “gossip shops for lazy people.” This is a description that surely renders the laundrette its own kind of accidental paradise, for lazy gossipers like me, at least. 

That naming reminds us that laundry was once a communal task, done for decades at the local washhouse, then later, the laundrette. These places have long facilitated (unpaid) gendered labour, but they have also long been social spaces, integral to working-class women’s lives.

Archival footage shows as much in gorgeous detail: we see women working hard, and the technology itself is often rendered beautifully, too: oddly mesmerising, steamy and hypnotic. The same footage allows us to see a kind of social provision hard to imagine today: many washhouses had cafes and creches attached to them, and so, in the words of one commentator, “for the women, they became a kind of club.” 

From Dot Cotton in Eastenders to Beyoncé in her Levi jeans, modern laundrettes, and the possibilities brought by them, have continued to be intensely associated with women’s lives. In both of these examples, the laundrette serves as a stand-in for something egalitarian – spaces which are massively dwindling by 2025. The laundrete is a place for daydreams and daily dramas, a place for life to simply spin on, allowing for idleness in the meantime. We’ve been taught to read the idea of airing dirty laundry in public so negatively, but the history of laundrettes is one that might be celebrated for its public communality – its refusal of stark, privatised, profit-incentivised boundaries between the home and the world beyond. 
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In 2009, the Vatican Newspaper suggested that washing machines had done more for women than the contraceptive pill. It’s taken as a given, now, that the modern washing machine has been a liberatory feminist force, but if so, it’s one that’s unevenly distributed along lines of race and class, and increasingly privatised. We’re encouraged to look away, and keep our stained linen to ourselves, but doing so, we risk missing an important history, one of hands making things, and reaching out across time.

Sitting down to write this, my washing machine shouts over me, urgent and demanding in the next room. The cheapest possible model, it is almost definitely broken. Occasionally, I break the flow of writing to check that my washing machine is still okay. Reassured, I return to my desk as it rages on, screaming behind me. It feels like a distraction, far from a creative force.

But beyond my own life, or denim ads, or the obvious brilliance of classic films like My Beautiful Laundrette, the shared laundry space has a rich cultural history. In “Woman in Kitchen,” by the poet Eavan Boland, for example, the washing machine also makes itself known – with emancipatory results. At the beginning of the poem, the speaker’s washing machine, like the rest of the appliances structuring her life, seem to drone on oppressively. She writes of being marooned in a clinical kitchen where everything is white, and “the light of day bleaches as it falls.” Then, in the third stanza, something shifts:

Machines jigsaw everything she knows.

And she is everywhere among their furor:

the tropic of the dryer tumbling clothes.

The round lunar window of the washer.”

Suddenly, the droning of the machines is not only a sedative, but a gateway to imagination. Heavy and mechanical, the sight and sounds of domestic appliances facilitate the kind of wide-eyed dreaming that only pure mundanity can. Briefly, the speaker of the poem is worlds away from the kitchen, the house, the planet. Her washer-drier transports her to the rainforest; transports her to the moon. I love “Woman in Kitchen,” because it refuses to decide that domesticity means any one particular thing, or has any one particular politics. The washing machine might be a drone, a drag, a chore, but it might also be a tool that cracks open imaginative play and shared cultures.  

“The laundrette remains a surprisingly emotional space, if one haunted by loss.” 

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In the late 1970s, the group Mother Art produced “Laundry Works,” a series of performances which took place in laundrettes across California. Each performance lasted the duration of one wash and dry, playing on the “literal revolution” of the ever-spinning drum. These performances help to show us what is creative, performative, and shared, about the space of the laundrette itself. The art collective The Heresies first came together whilst talking in a laundrette, and the UK based Half Moon Photography Workshop often displayed work in a laundrette in Mile End. In Mary Kelly’s lint works, Kelly pulls lint from her own tumble drier, transforming “particles of your own clothes and skin and things like that” into beautiful, polemic, pieces. Laundry isn’t only the subject, but might be the method.

Kim Sooja’s work has often featured motifs and textures related to laundry, working particularly with South Korean fabrics, bedcovers, and bundles, while The Washing Society, from 2018, concentrates especially on the experiences of migrant laundry workers in New York City, drawing a parallel between their struggles and the group the film takes its name from (a group of African-American laundry workers who, in 1881, formed their own trade union in the pursuit of fairer conditions and better pay). The specificities of these fabrics and their ways of being washed set women across the world apart, but they also stretch out a hand, or a ladder of bedsheets carefully tied together, bringing together struggles of class, gender, and work, and providing a rich basket of resources to be pulled out and repurposed. 

There are three films I especially love, all made by women in the 1980s, about or including laundry. The first is a sequence from Sirkka-Liisa Konttinen’s Byker, which blends documentary photography with fictionalised drama. The film is interested in the impacts of deindustrialisation on women, at times seeming to depict the laundrette as a harshly mechanised replacement for the livelier washhouses of days gone by. But it is also careful not to oversimplify: stories of shared trauma pour out in the cool reflective space facilitated by the machines, and the laundrette remains a surprisingly emotional space, if one haunted by loss. 

The second is Unfolding, made by Alia Syed, and shot on Deptford High Street in 1986 and 1987. Unfolding is more ekphrastic than explicitly ideological. In it, women’s whispered voices are heard alongside footage that prioritises the tactile, textural dynamics of the laundrette. The hypnotic movements of the machines are there again, but so too are methodically folded sheets, intimate creases, and many moving hands. We can’t always hear what is going on in Unfolding, a forced distance that reminds us of the unsteady place of the filmmaker. It also reminds us, I think, that a longing to hear and see something of the fabric of other people’s lives is no bad thing. 

Roberta Cantow’s Clotheslines, now something of a cult classic, takes a similarly intimate approach. Testimonies and images intermingle, pinned together like mismatched items on a line. The women’s stories blur together, and the result is a complex conjuring up of laundry as a communal, ambiguous, ritual, wafting through time. Most interestingly for me, the film allows the laundry to be rendered a kind of art of its own. It is a marker of intimacy, a network of social symbols, the endless suffocating drudge of yet another load, the overwhelming sensuality of crisp clean sheets, all at once. Ultimately, laundry becomes a way for the women to tell the stories of their lives.

Like Boland’s poem, none of these films prescribes what doing the laundry might (or might not) mean, in any straightforwardly political sense. Instead, they ask what doing the laundry feels like, who it touches, and how. Often, laundry is a footnote to feminist history, its mechanisation an aid to the real work of women’s liberation, but to begin to trace its own cultural history is to find a different set of stories: about community and solace, practicing creativity, working, waiting around, being lazy, gossiping, and much more too. 

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