Faced with a decimated high street, residents of an Anfield neighbourhood created a community hub, reviving much needed services, decent jobs, and social infrastructure.
There’s a wall of washing machines constantly on the go at Kitty’s Laundrette, and at the back of this modestly sized shop interior is a staff ironing and folding clothes and sheets. Except this is no ordinary laundrette. It’s what Grace Harrison, Organisational Development Lead here, describes as an “environmental enterprise” – a social enterprise with an environmental conscious.
They only use products that are less harmful to the natural world, like “biodegradable bags and eco-detergents”. Kitty’s also offers a dry-cleaning service free from harsh chemicals, and all washer-dryers run on electric from a supplier dealing in 100% renewables.
Kitty’s Laundrette: A Social Service
Situated in Anfield, on the boundary with Everton in northern Liverpool, UK, Kitty’s Laundrette is a stone’s throw from the city’s iconic football stadium. Despite that, in 2019 Anfield was ranked the 10th most deprived neighbourhood in England out of 32,844, measured against indicators including income, education, health, and barriers to services.
Deprivation this severe is known to considerably hinder people’s prospects and Grace tells us that locally it has caused “lots of issues around poor housing, child poverty, and lack of quality jobs”. Centre for Cities writes that, “In most struggling places people have got too little money to spend to sustain a thriving high street” so the hardship in Anfield is intrinsically linked with the decline of services and amenities. Furthermore, it aggravates the hygiene gap – when someone is unable to afford a basic standard of personal hygiene, which can be extremely isolating. That in turn can have profound implications for physical and mental health.
These are serious issues, but the suffering is unnecessary. So, in 2019, the worker-community cooperative Kitty’s Laundrette opened.
On the surface, Kitty’s provides an affordable do-it-yourself laundry service; this would also restore people’s personal comfort and dignity and bring life back to the high street. But there’s so much going on here that the laundry service almost seems secondary.
Much More than a Laundrette
Many people from the area come for connection, not cleaning.
The laundrette occupies a space which stood empty for a while on a street lined with Victorian redbrick terrace houses. Visitors are offered free tea and coffee as soon as they walk through the door. This staple of British society serves an inconspicuous purpose: sharing a hot drink gives trained staff a reason to start up conversation without seeming intrusive. “We’ll have a chat with you, we’ll make a connection, we’ll find out about what’s going on,” Grace explains. And, if it seems appropriate, “We might signpost you to other local services.”
As an example, the team here has helped people for whom English isn’t their first language to access statutory services which they otherwise would miss out on, like completing paperwork for securing a place on social housing. For some, the friendly and familiar faces here are more approachable than official channels.
We don’t have as many machines as we probably could have in there. Half of the space is [occupied by] comfy benches with cushions and tables, and we have free tea and coffee.
Others are “going through a really hard time” or lonely “and we are the only people that they speak to in a week,” Grace says. “They really value coming to us.”
Kitty’s Laundrette runs long days, open until 8pm most weekdays, and until 6pm at weekends. Doors only close on a Wednesday but even then, there’s a special programme of community events.
At various times of the week, visitors can engage in sessions like creative writing workshops, social history talks, film nights, knitting club, live music, street theatre, dance classes, kids’ story time, clothes swap, and board game meetups. Each designed to bring joy to Anfield but underlying it all is that sense of connection.
“People want those opportunities, to have new experiences and be part of things,” Grace remarks. “And that is really powerful.”
Image credits: Kitty’s Laundrette
Reviving the High Street, Kitty’s Style
Beyond the direct social benefits that Kitty’s provides is a lesson in how to bring prosperity back to an abandoned high street, not with a government regeneration package but with a team of people who care about their community.
Following the Wrong Path: Housing Market Renewal Programme
Anfield fell on hard times in the late 20th century, when Liverpool’s local industry was in decline. People moving away in their thousands left behind a stagnant housing market. That’s when the ill-fated Housing Market Renewal Programme – or “Pathfinders” scheme – was concocted to stimulate some of the UK’s poorest performing regional economies.
Families were relocated, allowing for whole streets to be demolished and rebuilt. Of the 400,000 UK homes affected, 18,000 were in Liverpool; 1,800 properties were cleared from Anfield, but many more derelict properties were left boarded up after budgets ran dry. The neighbourhood never recovered and other than premises catering for visiting football fans – like souvenir shops and pubs that only open on match days – there is still a need for what Grace calls “socially valuable spaces” for residents.
Community Takes Control
Faced with this situation, you’ve got two options: give in or take a stand. And the people of Liverpool are not known for being quitters!
In response to all of those things, it was about community-led activism. It was about making spaces on our high street that are useful for residents.
After the collapse of Pathfinders, artist Jeanne van Heeswijk got funding to use a former family-run bakery to host an art project exploring how local people could empower themselves to live well. That space became a social hub, with people coming in still expecting to buy bread – a clear call for the return of long-gone services.
This inspired the creation of two new organisations: the Home Baked Community Land Trust and the Home Baked Bakery.
A Community Land Trust (CLT) is a member-led collective which acts as the custodian of land and community assets in perpetuity, protecting it from market forces. It was this that made the reopening of Anfield’s bakery and later Kitty’s Laundrette possible, both of which brought back a spark of life and community cohesion to the high street.
Challenging the Traditional Business Model
Out of principle, no one is expected to volunteer at Kitty’s and all staff members are paid the real living wage. Set against the actual cost of living, this is currently £12.60 compared to the UK’s legal minimum wage of £7.55 per hour for anyone aged up to 18 years old, and £12.21 for over-21s.
The decision to pay everyone equally and run as a flat structure co-op – involving all members of staff in business decisions and programming – defies conventional business logic, which favours profit and requires a management hierarchy. But the team behind Kitty’s chose to work differently, prioritising instead equity, collectivism, personal development, and social value – principles of established frameworks within the co-operative movement.
Community-led Economic Development
So far, so good: Kitty’s recently celebrated its sixth year in business and an independent quantitative assessment of Kitty’s Laundrette’s impact in 2024 found that, for every £1 invested, it returns £43 in social value – or “social return on investment”. This is what the UK government defines as “the wellbeing of individuals and communities, encouraging interconnectedness and mutual support” and which the Institute for Social Value sees as a “net positive impact” on health and life satisfaction.
Kitty’s Laundrette now employs twelve people, many of them below the age of 30.
Young staff members especially are encouraged to have agency over the activities and events that the laundrette offers. They’re taught to develop programmes, write funding bids, and to lead on the delivery of their projects, all the while gaining employable skills in organisation, partnership building, communication, stakeholder management, budgeting, and public speaking.
“If you don’t understand money, then you don’t have power,” Grace says, “so we try to do a lot around financial literacy as well, to give people meaningful power to shape the business.”
First and Foremost a Business
At its core, Kitty’s is a business and holds a portfolio of small contracts with local hotels, sport clubs, cafes, and even AirBnB hosts: “Most organisations need something washing, from church robes to blankets that galleries wrap painting in.”
Its equitable business model makes it less vulnerable to the uncertainty of charitable funding streams, giving the team a lot more autonomy. Grace estimates that it generated about 20% of its total income in the first year of trading, which has risen now closer to 70%. The rest comes from grants and donations specifically for activities and workshops.
Grace is keen to keep this to a minimum.
“One of the many damaging things about the government austerity we have experienced over the last decade is that is makes community organisations compete over diminishing pots of money rather than collaborating with each other and that is so degrading to our society.”
In another move that may make other businessowners wince, the Kitty’s contracts subsidise washing and drying for those who cannot afford it, whether the individuals who drop in or connect with them through under-resourced yet essential services like “local children’s centres, food banks, and asylum services”.
For Grace, this is an essential strand of the cooperative’s place within the community: “We want to bring things to the area rather than take away any of the limited resources.”
Next Steps: Mobile Services
Until now, Kitty’s Laundrette’s business efforts have been restricted to clients who are happy to drop off and pick up their laundry, with one exception.
The laundrette opened the year before the COVID-19 pandemic when the country was sent into social isolation. Thankfully for the community Kitty’s serves, laundry services were classed as essential services and could continue operating, even if customers were not allowed inside.
Borrowing a cargo bike from another local co-op, they were able to collect and return laundry for vulnerable people who were “shielding” from the contagion. They also delivered shopping for them in the process.
After this relative success, Kitty’s came lose to buying their own cargo bike. Almost! “We quickly realised how the scale and quantities of laundry was just not going to work,” Grace explains.
Since then, they’ve teamed up with a local taxi driver to ferry laundry around because offering a delivery service opens up plenty of new opportunities for contracts, but with growing demand, they need to change their approach.
“That’s taught us a lot about like the logistics and complexity around deliveries. We know that to make it a sustainable service, we need to have our own van, and we need to integrate it into our operations.”
Calling on the Community
So now Kitty’s Laundrette is crowdfunding to buy an electric delivery van. The £20,000 target will also purchase the solar panels needed to charge it, keeping operational costs down.
One of the hopes with the van is that we will be able to get more commercial contracts, which will underpin the financial resilience of the business.
Continuing growth of the business seems to fly in the face of the sceptics who doubt the Kitty’s approach to business. It could be that they actually have a lot to learn from an organisation that puts social value first. Local authorities should maybe keep watch too and take lessons from Anfield about where investment should be directed to support the modern high street: not in large-scale infrastructure projects like Pathfinder, but in locally-run initiatives like Kitty’s Laundrette where community-buy in and social justice are metrics for success.
“It’s really amazing to think like what is possible,” Grace concludes. “If this is just one tiny place with twelve people and all these things are possible, you imagine if society was designed in a more pro-social way, what we could really be doing together.”
If you’ve interested to learn more about Kitty’s Laundrette’s delivery van campaign, visit their crowdfunding page.