LIMES LAUNDRY


  

In the High Street, on the left when heading east, and  just past Orchard Road, is now a line of housing built in the 1980s. There are more houses of similar age behind these in Limes Row , and these are clearly younger than the houses further down the road. For many decades this was the location of the Limes Laundry.

Click photos to enlarge



With the demise of horse drawn coaches due to the development of the motor car, Mr. Ballard, a coach-builder of some repute for many years in Farnborough, turned his hand to laundering and in 1902 founded The Limes Laundry.

   

In 1907 Mr. Ballard sold his business to Mr. George R. Miles and departed for Canada, where he opened a laundry in Vancouver. Mr. Miles continued washing for the people of Farnborough and surrounding district until 1929 when he sold the Limes Laundry to Mr. A. R. Grose.
Farnborough OS map  surveyed 1959-1969, published 1970. The laundry is marked

In the early 1950s Mr. Grose's son Brian joined his father running the laundry and this continued until the end of 1986 when the site was sold for housing development. There was by then little need for the laundry with the introduction of domestic washing machines and launderettes.  There is now no trace left of the laundry, but the name lives on in the form of Limes row, a turning off Orchard Road. Limes Row crosses the former laundry site.

Mr Brian Grose died in 2022, and his niece Rosemary kindly offered to donate to me a collection of old photographs showing the laundry, both inside and out.  Many of these are reproduced on this page.





 

 



The photographs below were taken in the 1960s when extensions to the building were being carried out. The new buildings were designed by Brian Gross who had trained as an architect.


 


   



My grateful thanks are extended to Rosemary Mann and her brother Jeremy Kite for providing these photographs and giving permission for them to be published on this website.

   


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