Broadwoodside in the Lowlands of Scotland sees a steady stream of guests and visitors who come by appointment to see the garden Anna and Robert Dalrymple have created around their 17th-century steading. Here, among the long grasses and mown walkways, shirts and pillowcases hang on lines and blow in the wind. “Visitors always comment on it,” says Anna, “Americans particularly. They say, ‘oh, we never do that any more!’ as, of course, they all have tumble dryers.”
The sight of laundry drying outdoors — sheets billowing at the bottom of the garden and huge knickers strung from tower block balconies — is heart-lifting. But it’s also a simple, grounding activity that feels especially relevant in this helter-skelter summer: slowing us down, wresting us from our screens, inviting us to step outside — harnessing the powers of nature and connecting us all along the line.
As well as being more environmentally friendly, the act of shaking out damp linen, breathing it in, finding the pegs and watching it catch the breeze, is calming. The effort is minimal and the rewards are quick. “When you’ve got it all folded up and into a basket, that’s very satisfactory,” says Anna.
There’s also a through line in a tradition unchanged for generations. Take Berthe Morisot’s “Hanging the Laundry Out to Dry”, painted in 1875, and the scene is not so very far from Broadwoodside today.
Davina Jackson has been painting laundry since the 1990s and it remains her most popular subject. “It’s nostalgic,” she says, “and it has universal appeal. It’s been a part of everyone’s lives.” Some may consider it a mundane subject, but Jackson’s work is layered with meaning — often she paints directly on to old book jackets rather than canvas, offering new narrative to stories from Britain’s colonial past.
There are also her memories of growing up under apartheid, passing the townships and seeing the laundry hanging, the maids doing the hard work of washing. “Many thoughts contrast in an everyday image.”
Most of her paintings are bought by women. Babies and small children necessitate a huge amount of washing. But there’s also some delight. “It brings us all back to our childhood,” she says. We probably can’t remember being a baby playing peek-a-boo, or ducking in and out of the sheets, but those memories are carried deep within.
“You’ve got to have fun where you can,” says Emily Attrill, who sells vintage laundry baskets at her shop, Straw, on London’s Columbia Road. She pops her baby son into a laundry basket while she works. “He loves it,” she says. He’s not the only one; Attrill’s monthly “basket drops” see 70 per cent of stock selling out within the first hour of going online.
Straw, along with other brands like East London Cloth and If Only If, play into the rustic aesthetic. “We are reactionary,” says Gemma Moulton, of East London Cloth, which is launching a range of vintage linens. “Where we once used Daz to get our sheets white, now, thinking about environmental impact, we prefer the sun’s natural UV stain-removing qualities,” she says. Line drying is also a better way to protect fabrics than machine washing; it doesn’t risk shrinkage or pilling.
Of course, washing lines require dry days, which is why — in the UK at least — we feel lucky when we get to use them. So too do they require outdoor space, even if just a scrap. The Italians are famously brilliant at conjuring this from nowhere, putting pulleys between alleyways in their cities. Instagram account @clotheslinespoetry provides daily postcards from the Mediterranean full of such scenes. The island of Burano pops up most regularly with white sheets batting against colourful houses.
Instagram has also provided a platform for the artist Helga Stentzel, whose photographs of laundry in the shape of animals went viral. With two sons, laundry was a “never-ending process” until one day, “I was putting some trousers on the line and realised they resembled a horse’s head,” she says. Playing around, she added a jumper and a tea towel and posted the image. From there Stentzel grew her menagerie, acquiring followers from the UK to Japan, and leading to exhibitions in South Korea and Miami. It’s a little bit of “magic in the mundane” she says, “something we often forget to look for”.
What you don’t get from Instagram is perhaps the best thing of all — the smell. Many have tried to recreate it but there’s nothing quite like the real thing. “It just smells different,” Stentzel says. “It’s full of oxygen, I like to think.” A small thing that does the power of good.
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