Launderama: London’s Launderettes presents Joshua Blackburn’s photographic record of one of the city’s most familiar and vulnerable everyday interiors. The project began as an online blog and grew from Blackburn’s ambition to document the remaining launderettes across London—more than 300, according to the book’s principal description. Published by Hoxton Mini Press in 2019, the volume gathers a selection of images with an introductory essay and map.

Blackburn’s subject is modest in scale but unusually rich in visual and social detail. Launderettes preserve forms of local identity that increasingly disappear from the high street: hand-painted or emphatic signs, saturated colours, rows of machines, worn surfaces, reflective materials and the measured geometry of repeated cycles. The photographs attend to these elements without reducing the spaces to design objects. Alongside their graphic character, the book recognizes the community spirit of places where practical routines bring strangers into temporary proximity.

That dual attention—to appearance and use—gives the work its particular strength. These interiors are neither presented as nostalgic curiosities nor treated simply as evidence of urban decline. They are functioning civic rooms, shaped by maintenance, habit and neighbourhood life, while also becoming endangered as launderettes continue to close across the United Kingdom. The map and essay extend the photographs beyond isolated views, giving the series a documentary frame and a sense of geographic relation.

For collectors, Launderama is significant as a focused record of an overlooked urban typology at a moment of change. Its subject is specific, its visual language is immediately legible, and its value lies in the sustained attention brought to places usually passed without notice. The English-language hardcover, issued in 2019 with 144 pages, is a considered book-length account of London’s launderettes and of the design, labour and sociability embedded in them.