A washing machine is rarely worth crossing town for, but most washing machines aren’t like those in the Barbican Launderette. To one side, 10 of them stand proud, lined up like a regiment. Each is as tall as a man. They are a green that does not exist in nature: the green of mint choc chip ice green and of mouthwash, of Fender guitars and Californian Cadillacs. They have stood here, unchanging, since the early Seventies. You can use them to wash clothes, or to travel back in time.
A different world
The machines first made it here in 1973, the launderette opening three years before the estate’s last building, Shakespeare Tower, was finished. Though owned, managed and rented out by the Corporation of the City of London, the Barbican Estate was never “council housing” — it was marketed at high-flyers, captains of industry, men of the universe. Big names duly moved in: George Best, Sir Peter Hall, Clive James. It housed both minor aristocrats — the Earl of Elgin — and leftie, establishment scourges, like Arthur Scargill, who without moral qualm let his union pay his rent for him. It was its own little city of success stories, 2,100 executive homes. Washing in one didn’t always suit the tone. Rather than being a last resort, the launderette opened as another of the estate’s luxuries; no need for wet towels clogging up the sitting room.
They are the green of mint choc chip ice cream, of Fender guitars and Californian Cadillacs
What residents are met with now is much as they would have been met with then. Extraordinarily, almost nothing has changed — not out of nostalgia-tinged conceit, but because it hasn’t been needed. It is unassuming: over a glass frontage its name is spelt out on a blue sign with white illuminated letters, same typography as the tube. The surf green machines take one half of the room, while opposite are grey, steely-looking dryers. Unusually, both these and the main machines run not on electricity but gas. Both shudder and hum and live off coins: cash will forever be king in here.
On one side is a wall of Formica orange, the rest of the place cladded in both brickwork wallpaper and the faux-wood panelling that used to be on the dashboards of ministerial cars. This is a room of box lighting and old-fashioned floor tiles of scattered black and grey chips. Plain wooden benches sit expectantly in front of the machines, for empty baskets and their exhausted owners.Around the room are posters: instructions for the uninitiated, encouragement to “forget your washday blues!”, and Mr Soapy — “he has the best soap!” — an ageless rubber duck who has been here forever. Change takes its time here: it wasn’t that long ago that a small post-it reminded users that only “new” 50p coins were permissible, despite the old one being de-monetised in 1998. The laundry rules act as aids — “empty pockets” — and warnings: “finders keepers”. For 30 years, Pam Mason was the proprietor: she wrote her signs, about which machines were misfiring, or the days she was taking off, in capital letters drawn in blue and red felt-tip. Graphic designer and launderette regular David McKendrick was so taken with them that he turned her handwriting into a typeface: notes of hers still make his magazine, Paperboy.
Besides what’s on the wall, this is a world of chromium-plated words from a different time: Washeteria, Electrolux Wascator. Made-up names offering a glimpse of a future that has never taken shape the way people thought it would. It if sounds like a movie set, that’s because it is. Scenes from Killing Eve scenes were shot here, so too in Slow Horses: Gary OIman’s Jackson Lamb uses it as a base in which to meet informants. It is a favourite for brand campaigns and magazine shoots. The Barbican Launderette stayed still as the world around it moved on, but now the world is coming back.
A place of equals
But perhaps the most compelling document of the place exists in an award-winning short film, Launderette, by photographer Oliver Mayhall. In it Mayhall captures something of the place that goes beyond its time capsule good looks. The launderette is somewhere for people to go; in quiet moments, it offers a warm room for solitude. When it’s busy, the regulars interact. Over the years, it has become somewhere for people to meet others. The Barbican, for all its brutalist beauty, can be an isolating spot: as an estate, it feels almost endless. The launderette is a great leveller. Proof of its place as a social hub was cemented six years ago, when Mason left and the place briefly closed. Locals decided to see if they could save it, perhaps reopen the space partly as a cafe. What was built to serve the community had become part of it.
It was a hoo-ha was over nothing: the closure was to take out the asbestos. Soon it reopened under the stewardship of Masoud Kochak and his son Daniel.
Stewardship is the right word. The launderette makes little financial sense to run. Profit could be much more easily be made by selling the space off; its square footage is valuable. And it is hard to keep people coming back when the cost of gas is so high. But the Kochaks have a sense of history. Masoud in particular likes to keep things as they were, preserving the scene even as he makes the launderette more useful, offering dry cleaning and staying on hand to help his customers out, dutifully opening each morning at 7.30am, closing at 7pm. It is a long day of drying and folding, of tinkering with the machines, of chatting to those coming and going. Of recognising the regulars. There is a sense of keeping things as they should be. And not just of preserving the past, but maintaining it for the modern day: the machines will keep spinning as long as they’re looked after, as long as they’re wanted. Their permanence is intended. In an ephemeral world of planned obsolescence, it’s something to cross town for.
2 Fann Strett, EC2Y 8BR
