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London - Premier Inn County Hall

I’m hoping someone can advise me if there is anywhere in the vicinity of this hotel to do laundry? I’m looking at flats to rent, but we are two couples and I’m having difficulty finding a 2 bedroom 2 bath place in a location I like with a price we want to pay. If there is a laundry facility nearby this hotel would work well for us. Thanks for any information you can share.

https://www.premierinn.com/gb/en/hotels/england/greater-london/london/london-county-hall.html?ARRdd=26&ARRmm=09&ARRyyyy=2022&NIGHTS=1&ROOMS=1&ADULT1=1&CHILD1=0&COT1=0&INTTYP1=DB&BRAND=PI

Posted by
3938 posts

The closest one I see is a 9min walk away. Lambeth Dry Cleaners & Laundry, 16 Kennington Rd, London SE1 7BL, United Kingdom

EDIT: their FB page says 5 shirts for 8£. That’s probably dry cleaning. They do have laundry service too. Not sure about do it yourself.

Posted by
1216 posts

Have you asked the hotel? It is a great place to stay. The Park Plaza in the same building seems to have a service.

Posted by
2709 posts

That is indeed essentially a dry cleaner, and their Facebook page is very old..

There is a launderette at 141 Lambeth Walk, under a mile walk from the County Hall Premier Inn. You can use the coin op machines yourself, or you can arrange for a service wash. We have done both. You can
leave a wash load early and get it back at end of day before they close.

Posted by
10178 posts

Thanks for your replies. Those are both good options. Now I feel better about staying at a hotel instead of looking for a flat with a washer. We stayed less than a mile from this hotel for a week in a studio apartment in the past. I asked the landlord about laundry facilities nearby and she had no idea. When I did a google search to try to find a laundromat I couldn’t find anything. Apparently I wasn’t using the correct terminology.

Posted by
8572 posts

Andrea going to be blunt about UK Washer and Dryer appliances. They are small and take forever. So even if you got a flat its an ordeal to do wash. Not kidding.

Go with a launderette. Far easier IMHO. Looks like there’s a good one within a 15 minute walk on Kennington Rd.

Or I’ll throw out the question “ where do you want to stay?”

Posted by
10178 posts

Claudia, I’m sure you’re right about washers and dryers there. I’ve experienced that in other parts of Europe as well. This portion of our trip is the last leg of 6 weeks in Ireland, Scotland and England with another couple. We will have washers off and on throughout the trip, including a 3 or 4 days before arriving in London. We will be in London for 4 nights, at which point our friends fly home and we go to France. Three weeks later we return to London and will be there for 8 nights before we fly home. We have a flat with a washer for that time. Our friends won’t need to laundry as they will be going home. I expect we won’t be able to do any until we have been in France for a few days. I don’t mind doing some sink washing, but having the option of a launderette would be helpful.

For the time with our friends I would like to have easy access via tube, bus and walking to see as much as possible during the 3 full days there. The husband of the other couple has never been to London before and the wife was there once about 15 years ago. I thought this hotel would be a good location, but not too noisy. I found a place in Covent Garden, but she’s a very light sleeper and not overly enthusiastic about crowds and cities. When I was in Paris for a week with her, her favorite experiences were going to Giverny and to Versailles, not for the palace though. She liked the gardens, hamlet, etc.

Posted by
11294 posts

" When I did a google search to try to find a laundromat I couldn’t find anything. Apparently I wasn’t using the correct terminology."

The British term is laundrette, also spelled launderette. And the British term for leaving your clothes to be washed and dried by the laundrette staff is service wash (very nice while traveling and not that much more expensive than doing it yourself). If you do want a service wash, be sure to look at the times carefully; what are the drop off and pick up hours, and how long will it take?

If you do end up using a British washing machine in an apartment, I can offer the tip to select "short cycle." With this, a cold water wash takes about 30 minutes; without it, it takes 90 minutes.

In a laundrette, the dryers get hot (sometimes very hot - be careful about over-drying to avoid damage). In other places, many of them are convection dryers, which remove the water in another way. These don't get hot, take a long time, and don't get the clothes completely dry; you are expected to hang them for a half-day or more to get them fully dry. So, you don't want to be using one of these if you're planning to put the clothes from the dryer directly into a suitcase. I often do laundry on my way out of a place, but I've learned to check if the dryers are convection, in which case I do laundry the night before.