The Choir That Rehearses in the Launderette

Every Thursday at half past seven, the Wash and Fold on Kettle Street gets a little louder. Warm light spills out onto the pavement, the dryers hum, the air smells of clean cotton and fabric softener, and fourteen people in woolly scarves stand in a curve between machines six and nine, clearing their throats.

They are the Kettle Street Community Choir, and they never planned to be here. For eleven years they rehearsed in the old community hall next door, until one wet November a brown stain appeared on the ceiling above the altos and began, very slowly, to drip. The caretaker put out a bucket. The bucket kept better time than the tenors. After three weeks of this, Dolores, who owns the launderette and had been listening through the wall, came round with a plate of biscuits and an offer.

The first rehearsal was chaos. Machine four went into its spin cycle in the middle of a lullaby and shook the floor like a passing lorry. The sopranos gave up. But Mr Okafor, the conductor, a retired music teacher who once taught a whole class of seven-year-olds to sing in a round, simply listened, tapped his pencil and announced that machine four was in B flat. By the second week he had rearranged two songs so that the spin cycle arrived exactly where the drums would have been.

The regulars adapted too. A student who does her washing on Thursdays now brings her own song sheet and sings the harmony while she folds. A man waiting for his duvet joined the basses and has not missed a week since, although his duvet has long been dry. Passengers on the night bus press their faces to the window as it goes by, and at least one driver has been known to slow down for the chorus.

The hall roof was fixed in March. The choir held a vote, and it was not close. They still rehearse in the launderette, and on concert nights, when they sing in the hall, a recording of machine four plays softly at the back, because the songs no longer sound right without it.

The real idea behind it

Choirs really do seem to turn strangers into friends unusually quickly. In 2015, researchers at the University of Oxford followed adult evening classes for seven months and found that people in the singing classes grew close to each other faster than people learning crafts or creative writing, although the other classes caught up in the end. The team called it the ice-breaker effect.

Part of the reason may be that singing together means breathing together. A Swedish study of choir singers, published in 2013, found that as they sang slow, steady phrases, their heart rates began to rise and fall together. You do not need a launderette to feel it. Any group that sings, even badly, even round a birthday cake, is doing the same small, friendly thing: keeping time with the people beside them, one breath at a time.