Britain’s first launderette opened on Queensway in west London in May 1949. Like so many others, it was an American idea, with a Fort Worth businessman opening something called a “washateria” fifteen years earlier.
The concept of launderettes arrived in a country where hardly anyone owned a washing machine four years after the Second World War ended – starting a story that continues to this day, even if it has shifted somewhat.
Laundry Day Is Not What It Used To Be
The pitch was simple enough: you pay for an hour of the machine instead of buying one. Through the 1950s and 1960s, the economics made sense and shops spread across urban and suburban Britain until there was one on most parades. The word settled into the language on its own terms. Americans kept “laundromat” (ditching the silly “washateria”, though it is apparently still in use among old folk in Texas somehow), while Britain took “launderettes” and never gave it up.
The BBC’s account of the rise and fall of the launderette traces the whole arc from that first Queensway shop, and the rise half of it is over quickly.
By the mid-1980s, launderettes had become common enough to be a cultural touchstone. In 1985, Bartle Bogle Hegarty set a Levi’s commercial in a period launderette, and it worked well enough that it still placed sixth when the hundred greatest television advertisements were ranked fifteen years later. The same year, Stephen Frears released a movie called “My Beautiful Laundrette”, starring Daniel Day-Lewis and written by Hanif Kureishi; the BFI’s return to the film’s London locations four decades on shows how much has changed since.
Both used the location as a backdrop for something very different from the mere matter of laundry – and it worked because everyone could immediately picture the place in their life.
The Foam Outlasted The Shop
The mid-80s marked the beginning of the end. As domestic machines got cheaper, launderettes started to lose relevance. By 2010, there were around three thousand left in the UK. Laundrettes still have relevance worldwide in areas where there are fewer property owners than renters, where washing machines themselves are less common, and you can see these reflected in more recent entertainment such as the principal setting of the film “Everything Everywhere All at Once”.
The broader iconography has survived, too: foam has become a self-contained signal, readable without any of the equipment that once produced it, and it has drifted steadily into places where nothing is being washed at all. The Double Bubble slot game on British bingo sites builds its entire look out of a pastel screen filling with pink suds, set against cherries, plums and BAR symbols.
Launderettes are still here, even if much thinner on the ground than they used to be – and a good deal quieter, too. Even as the picture they gave Britain came loose from them decades ago, it has been working on its own ever since. The “laundrette”, in its unusual way, remained beautiful well into the mid-2020s. Who knows what interesting shifts the future will hold?
Images courtesy of unsplash.com, pexels.com and Freepix.com
