"A lavoir (wash-house) is a public place set aside for the washing of clothes. Communal washing places were common in Europe until industrial washing was introduced, and this process in turn was replaced by domestic washing machines and by launderettes. The English word is borrowed from the French language, which also uses the expression bassin public, "public basin".
Lavoirs were built from the seventeenth to the early twentieth centuries. With the Baron Haussmann´s redesign of Paris in the 1850s, a free lavoir was established in every neighbourhood, and government grants encouraged municipalities across France to construct their own. Lavoirs are more common in certain areas, such as around the Canal du Midi." - (en.wikipedia.org 06.01.2021)
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