Lavoir

A lavoir is a public washhouse, a place set aside for washing clothes that was once common across Europe before the household washing machine. Lavoirs spread widely between the seventeenth and early twentieth centuries, and their growth accelerated sharply during Baron Haussmann's rebuilding of Paris in the 1850s, when he had free public wash houses built in every neighborhood, a model other French municipalities then copied with government financial support. They were usually sited by a spring or riverbank and often roofed for shelter, and some communities built floating versions, laundry boats moored on rivers such as the Seine and the Rhone; the type was especially common around the Canal du Midi in southern France. Piped water, home washing machines and self service laundries eventually made lavoirs obsolete, though many communities have since restored their old washhouses, some of which date back as far as the tenth century.