The Perth ‘Steamies’ The Story of the Fair City’s Public Washhouses (1846-1976)

Until the 1920s, Perth hadn’t spread much beyond what we call, nowadays, the ‘town centre’. In that tight space, some 30,000 people lived in small, cramped and often unsanitary conditions without the means to keep themselves and their homes clean to the standards we take for granted today. Things had been that way since medieval times. Still, the Victorians did something about it by providing, at public expense, baths and washhouses where ‘the working classes’ could, at a small cost, bathe and do their laundry in facilities supplied and run by the Town Council. In Perth, between 1846 and 1976, two such facilities existed and were well-used until they became redundant due to improved housing conditions, the physical spread of the city and rising living standards. The end, when it came, was controversial and strenuously opposed by the declining number of women who used what they affectionately called ‘The Steamie’. The rise and decline of Perth’s Steamies, the controversy surrounding their closure and the physical reshaping of the city which brought an end to that era are the subject of this book.