Laundry & ironing service in Delft

We know Delft for Vermeer, for the canals and for Delft Blue. Less well known: the city had a serious textile industry. On the Voldersgracht — exactly where the Vermeercentrum now stands — the Delft cloth hall stood until 1645. In large vats outside the houses along that canal, 'fullers' trampled wool in warm water and urine: a dirty but essential step to make woollen cloth waterproof and shrink-resistant. The print above, Philip Zilcken's etching after Vermeer's View of Delft, shows the city as it then looked from the Schie.

Around the city, to the west and south, stretched grass fields that hosted the other textile trade: bleaching. Washed linen was spread out on those fields, crisscrossed by ditches for wetting, so that sun, wind and rain could whiten it. Bleacheries stood mainly on the city's outskirts, where waterways and open meadows met. After the invention of the steam laundry in the nineteenth century, many of those bleachers moved with the times: they built a laundry on the same spot.

Delft was always central. The Delftsche Schie, dug around 1389 as a shipping link to the Maas, made the city a hub in the network of canals between Leiden, The Hague, Rotterdam and Schiedam. Wool, cloth and linen from the polders and city industries travelled this water. Anyone sailing from Delft to Leiden also passed the same bleacheries and laundries along the Vliet — it was an entire landscape of water, meadow and white linen.

The vats and grass fields are gone, the need is not. We drive set pickup days through Delft — the centre around the Markt, Delftzicht, Tanthof, Voorhof and Buitenhof. Your bag hangs out in the morning, and comes back in the evening clean, ironed and neatly folded with the same driver. No dry-cleaner trip, no waiting time — only the result Delft has been known for for centuries: craftsmanship, carefully done.