Laundry

Here are some pictures of the laundry room at a National Trust House, Kingston Lacy, which I visited this week. It gives some idea of the amount of work involved for the servants in keeping those' above stairs ' clean and respectable. The house was the home of the Bankes family for 300 years, it was built when their lands were restored. They lost their estates following the fall of Corfe Castle to the Roundheads. The house is in Dorset where I spent a few days this week with a friend and her daughter.
We stayed on the coast and the views were lovely, with high seas and blustering winds, but still sunny.

Can you see the old mangle, the flat irons and the good old Singer hand machine? I grew up using one of those and the tension seemed to take hours to get right.