South Street Wash House

With no hot water in the houses, a smokey/sooty atmosphere and a climate that often made it impossible to dry clothes, the South Street Wash House was a place visited on a regular basis.   It occupied a site on the corner of South Street and Upper Plymouth Grove.

A few years ago Sharron Bailey (née Edwards) wrote a letter to the Manchester Evening News in which she gave an account of her mother's weekly trips to another of the wash-houses on the Osborne Street.

In those days the women had to have a "ticket". That was a booked time every week and a ticket for a reasonable time on a convenient day was a great prize indeed. Our Mam's was 10 o'clock on Saturday and I don't ever recall her missing her ticket. (Two missed tickets and your booking was lost). Hail, rain or snow, she went. She used to tell me that when she was eight months pregnant with me she fell down the wash-house steps, trolley, washing basket and washing as well, and just picked it up and carried on home.

She went to the wash-house with powder, bleach and a huge bristly scrubbing brush and got through an enormous amount of washing in two hours. It came back all spotlessly clean, ironed and folded.

It was a woman's domain, that wash-house. An exciting place to me as a child, full of steam and soapy smells and puddles of suds on the floor. Children were rarely allowed in because of the machinery, and I only ever remember getting through those doors twice in all the years."

I never did get in to the South Street Wash-House but I passed it 4 times a day on my way to and from school. I remember well that on the Upper Plymouth Grove side there was a big doorway to the boiler room and it was usually open. Inside the boiler men would be working their way through a mountain of coke and calling out greetings to everyone going by. Albert Harrison, my neighbour from Holt street, was boiler man there for a while.

South Street in 1999 - donated by Bill Bullock