This summer, hordes of tourists have been crossing the Atlantic to celebrate post-lockdown travel freedoms. But for some North Americans visiting UK homes, a surprise awaits in the kitchen that highlights a striking cultural gap.
The culprit is the humble washing machine. In British homes, this device often sits by the sink or fridge. So, too, in other parts of Europe. And it seems entirely normal to those residents. But not to most Americans, Canadians and Australians, who prefer to locate their washing machines in a separate room or cupboard. And they consider keeping one in the kitchen bizarre, if not dirty.
“It’s gross,” one New York friend recently declared, after staying in a British Airbnb. Tanya Vincent, an Australian architect, wrote a few years ago: “A house with a utility room is a quieter, tidier, more hygienic home . . .[but] the washing machine in the kitchen is a convention so entrenched [in the UK] that it is barely questioned.”
Is this just a piece of tourist trivia? Perhaps. As so often when arguments break out about electric kettles, mixer taps and other “local” appliances, both sides protest loudly about generalisations. Of course, there are plenty of British homes with utility rooms. But that has not always been the case. The anthropologist Kirsten Bell has written: “Home architecture can reveal a lot about a society’s cultural values.” And the laundry issue is a case in point.
If you were to ask homeowners to explain the split, I daresay many would blame it on physical constraints. Most notably, middle-class dwellings in North America and Australia tend to be bigger and newer than British ones, which makes it easier to install a utility room. Bell writes: “Even in cities [in North America and Australia] where space is at a premium, architects still find room for laundry areas,” adding: “What foreigners find most bewildering about British attitudes to washing machines [is that] even when people have the option to place their washing machine elsewhere, they seem to prefer the kitchen.”
She suspects the real explanation lies in evolving attitudes to privacy. Before the 1950s, western kitchens tended to be at the back of the house as they were considered to be low status, “dealing with food, dirt, women, and servants,” as Louise Johnson, the geographer, has noted. Because domestic processes were kept out of sight, nobody noticed or cared if they got mixed up.
But the second half of the 20th century saw the rise of open-plan living, and cooking began to be viewed not as a private chore, but as a public ritual to bond families and social groups. Hence the rise of TV chefs who made cooking and entertaining out to be a cohesive experience.
As a result, in many American homes the cooking moved out of private back rooms into a more public space. Laundry, by contrast, remained a private affair and was duly relegated elsewhere. “This is why washing machines in kitchens seem odd to most [non-British observers],” writes Bell. “Living spaces are areas where we relax, socialise, cook and eat [but] not the appropriate location to perform ablutions on our bodies or cloth.”
So why was the UK different? Kate Fox, another anthropologist, blames it on the English obsession with privacy. Even when open-plan living exists, English homeowners often continue to distinguish between “family” and “guest” space and put “cooking” (and laundry) in the former.
Some Brits may have shifted. However, a 2017 YouGov survey revealed that 67 per cent of Brits believe “the kitchen is the right place to have a washing machine”, and only 15 per cent disagree.
There are three lessons here. First, our concept of “cleanliness” is never neutral. As the British anthropologist Mary Douglas once observed, dirt is best defined as “matter out of place” (or, you might say, something that breaches our unspoken cultural classification system). Second, these systems can vary markedly between cultures, even though we tend to assume that our own taxonomy is not just the “natural” one, but that it should be universal.
Finally, the only way to appreciate these differences is to periodically look at our surroundings with fresh, non-judgmental eyes. That is never easy to do, least of all in a world that prizes streamlined focus and instant judgment. “Observation as a skill sounds straightforward, but most of us are getting it wrong,” as philosopher Christian Madsbjerg notes in his new book Look.
The laundry wars are just a metaphor for the wider challenge, and dirty secret, that faces us in a globalised world: our own assumptions are not universal — even when we “clean”.
Follow Gillian on Twitter @gilliantett and email her at gillian.tett@ft.com
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