Nobody was there by choice, and everybody behaved beautifully. Here are twelve.
1. You Were There Because You Had To Be
Nobody went for pleasure. Either the house had no machine, or the machine had broken, or there was something too large to deal with at home.
Which meant the whole room was full of people in the same mildly inconvenienced mood, and that shared circumstance set the atmosphere completely.
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2. The Row of Machines Had a Hierarchy
They looked identical and they were not. Regulars knew which one was reliable, which one was slow, and which one did something unspeakable to a load if you trusted it.
The bad one was frequently the last to be taken, and anybody loading it was quietly identified as somebody who did not come here often.
3. You Brought the Powder With You
A box, or more usually a measured amount decanted into a bag or an old container, carried from home along with everything else.
There was normally a machine on the wall that sold it in tiny expensive portions, and using it was an admission that you had forgotten.
4. Everything Depended on Having the Right Coins
The machines took specific coins and nothing else. Not notes, not a card, and frequently not even the wrong combination of correct coins.
Which is why every trip began with an inventory of a purse, and why the change machine, when there was one, was the most important object in the building.
5. The Dryers Were Sold in Small Expensive Chunks
Drying was charged by a handful of minutes at a time, in a big drum that roared, and it was never quite enough.
So there was a repeated decision to make about whether to feed it again or take everything home slightly damp, and everybody got that decision wrong at least once.
6. The Smell Was Specific and Unmistakable
Hot metal, warm damp cotton, detergent and the particular dusty scent of air that had been pushed through a lot of fabric.
It was not unpleasant, it existed nowhere else, and anybody who spent time in one can still produce it from memory on demand.
7. It Was Extremely Loud and Nobody Talked
Several machines on different cycles produced a wall of noise that made conversation hardest, which suited everybody.
People nodded, took the chair furthest from the one already occupied, and said nothing for forty minutes. It was one of the most companionably silent rooms in the country.
8. The Waiting Was the Whole Experience
There was nothing to do and nowhere to go. Leaving meant risking somebody moving your washing, so most people stayed.
The reading material was whatever had been abandoned on a chair, and a great many people read a great many pages of things they would never have chosen.
9. The Folding Table Was a Public Performance
There was always one long table, and using it meant handling your family’s entire laundry in front of strangers.
Everybody developed a technique for doing this quickly and with as little display as possible, and everybody politely looked somewhere else.
10. You Could Pay Somebody Else to Do It
Dropping a bagful off in the morning and collecting it later, washed and folded far better than you would have managed, was the great luxury.
It came back squared off into a neat parcel in a way nobody has ever reproduced at home, and it cost more than it felt like it should.
11. Somebody Was Always There
Not staff, necessarily. A person who was in that chair every time you came, who knew which machine was broken and whose washing was whose.
They were part of the fittings, they told you things you had not asked, and they were frequently the only reason anybody knew anything about the place.
12. The Ones Still Open Have Not Changed
Walk into one now and the layout, the chairs along the wall, the long table and the noise are recognisably the same.
The coin slots have mostly been modernised and nothing else has, because the arrangement was efficient the first time and there has been nothing to improve.
A Room of Strangers Being Very Polite
A place nobody chose, a bag of powder from home, machines that only took one kind of coin, a drum sold in small expensive chunks, and forty minutes of extremely companionable silence.
The seventh item is the one everybody recognises immediately. Several machines on different cycles made the room too loud for conversation, which meant nobody had to have one – so a room full of strangers sat in rows for the best part of an hour, perfectly content, saying absolutely nothing to each other.
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