The former washhouses

Fed by the waters of the Petite Aubette, the laundries are located between the Henri Becquerel centre and the Vauquelin chapel, close to the Hospice General's laundry where the laundresses wash the laundry of the boarders and "convalescents".

After wringing out (soaking in cold water and rough scrubbing with a brush), pouring (passing through hot water with ashes, replaced around 1910 by "Persil") and soaking, the linen transported to the laundries was beaten, rubbed with a quack grass brush and soap, rinsed and wrung out by about twenty washerwomen, kneeling along the stream in all weathers. It is then hung up in the attics to dry, and finally folded and put away.

If the job of the washerwomen was dangerous (suppression of menstruation, respiratory problems due to the lye vapours, panic attacks, etc.), that of the washerwomen caused chapping caused by the cold as well as calluses on the forearms and hands due to rubbing against the edges of the tub and the handling of the brushes.

At the end of the 19th century, tuberculosis took its toll: a quarter of the women were affected and half of them died. A 1905 decree imposed new hygiene measures such as the separation of dirty and clean linen during transport, as well as smocks and soap for the workers who sorted the linen...

The laundry was enlarged and modernised in the early 1930s. On 5 June 1940, a German bomb destroyed the transformer and the enclosing wall in rue d'Amiens.

In 1969, the CHR Charles-Nicolle acquired a central laundry on the route de Lyons.