The Laundry: Where 119 Years of Brixton History Meets New Zealand
How a Kiwi chef fell in love with a Victorian laundry and created one of South London and Brixtons most beloved restaurants
You know that building on Coldharbour Lane? The Victorian one with “Sanitary Steam Laundry” and “Shirt and Collar Dressing and Dyeing and Cleaning Works” etched into the brickwork? “Walton Lodge” at the top, “1904” sitting at the apex?
That building served Brixton for 119 years. The same family owned it for over a century, running a laundry operation that cleaned linen for the grand hotels on Park Lane. They pressed sheets, ran satellite operations across South London. Generation after generation.
Today, it’s still serving. But instead of pressed collars and starched sheets, it’s serving bavette steak marinated in ginger, and cucumber margaritas perfected in Mexico.
I sat down with Mel, the Kiwi and now Brixton chef behind The Laundry, to hear the story.
“Brixton Chose Me”
“I don’t think I chose Brixton. I think Brixton chose me.”
Mel arrived from New Zealand 21 years ago, a trained chef who’d gone on to study wine and become a sommelier. She settled in Streatham Hill and opened a New Zealand wine shop at Pop Brixton - some of you might remember it.
Every day, she drove past that Victorian building on Coldharbour Lane. Every day, it called to her.
“This building was just speaking at me,” she told me. “I was like, I have to put a restaurant in there. I have to put a restaurant in there.”
She didn’t know the building’s history then. Didn’t know about the 119 years of laundry service, the Park Lane hotels, the generations of the same family. All she knew was that something about this place wouldn’t let her go.
Then came the twist: her landlord also owned this building. Fate had played its hand. Mel gathered investors and pitched them something unusual: not just a restaurant, but a preservation of what had been there before.
Preserving the Heritage
Walk into The Laundry, and you’ll find Victorian-era photographs on the walls, images of the original laundry workers at work. Artefacts from the old operation. Menus from the laundry reception. These aren’t decorative choices. They’re acts of preservation.
“For me, it was about preserving the integrity of the business that was in Brixton for 119 years,” Mel explained. “They serviced the hotels on Park Lane with their linen and their sheets. They had little satellite offerings all around South London”
She paused, glancing at the photographs.
“Those artefacts and pictures were really important to me to keep.”
This is what struck me. Here’s someone from New Zealand who chose not to impose her vision on the space, but to let our building’s history inform what it would become. This isn’t a New Zealand restaurant that happens to be in Brixton. It’s a Brixton restaurant, run by someone who understood that the building’s Brixton story was worth continuing.
“It’s not just about providing a service,” she said. “It’s about really integrating into the community.”
And she means it. Mel volunteers monthly at Big Kid Foundation on Atlantic Road, teaching kids to cook. Her philosophy there mirrors her philosophy everywhere: “Practice makes progress. It doesn’t make perfection.”
Simple, Bold, Classic
I asked Mel to describe the food. She didn’t reach for culinary jargon.
“Simple, bold, classic cooking. Wholesome, good value, full of flavour. We’re not trying to be complicated.”
But simplicity doesn’t mean lack of thought. Their signature steak frites uses bavette marinated for 24 hours in ginger, tenderising the meat until it’s impossibly soft. It’s served with Cafe de Paris butter(I had to Google that one :-) ), containing 26 ingredients.
“It’s such a simple dish, but paired with something that’s got quite bold flavours.”
The menu draws from parmigiana (not to be confused with the classic parmigiana reggiana; it’s an Aussie dish with no aubergine in sight!), chicken, leek and lardo pie, pork croquettes perfect for the bar. French bistro meets New Zealand sensibility meets Australian comfort food, all filtered through what works for us.
The Margarita That Went to Mexico
If you’ve been to The Laundry, you’ve probably had the cucumber margarita.
Mel didn’t just develop it through bar experimentation. She went to Mexico.
“I went all the way to Mexico to make sure we had the recipe right,” she told me. “I actually learned quite a lot about how to extract the flavour of cucumber. Previously, we were infusing the cucumber into a sugar syrup. But actually, you just make straight cucumber juice, and it keeps it really light and fresh.”
This is how Mel approaches everything. It would have been easy to develop a “good enough” version. Most of us wouldn’t know the difference. But she would.
The Restaurant Brixton Thinks It Doesn’t Have
There’s a line I hear all the time in Brixton.
“There aren’t a lot of places to have breakfast.”
“There’s nowhere to have a proper lunch.”
“Everything only really opens at night.”
So I was surprised — and honestly a little embarrassed — to realise I didn’t even know they were open all day.
The Laundry’s kitchen runs from 8:30am until 9:30pm. Breakfast, lunch, coffee, cocktails, dinner. No pause. No reset. All day.
“Our kitchen never sleeps,” Mel told me. “Especially for people who work different hours — doctors, NHS staff, people on shifts. Sometimes lunch is at three in the afternoon. We’re built for that.”
This is the part most people don’t know: this isn’t a café pretending to be a restaurant by night. It’s a high-end restaurant that happens to be open for breakfast, lunch and dinner — and has been the whole time.
I’ll be honest. I’ve walked past The Laundry countless times assuming it was dinner-only. I’m clearly not alone. Somewhere along the way, Brixton missed the memo.
The space is built for it too. A terrace seating 70. A lower ground floor for 36, split into private rooms. A ground-floor café and bar where you can slide in for a quick martini, spritz, or late lunch without ceremony.
Add La Perro — their French-inspired happy hour running 5pm to 7pm daily —, and you start to see what this place really is: not just a destination restaurant, but a flexible, all-day anchor for the neighbourhood.
The irony? While we say Brixton lacks daytime dining, one of its best kitchens has been quietly doing exactly that.
Through Challenge Comes Opportunity
I asked Mel directly about Brixton and what I am calling the Brixton Problem.
About the things I hear all the time from businesses in Brixton— declining footfall, safety concerns, businesses struggling to stay open, the sense that the neighbourhood is in a moment of uncertainty.
“Through every challenge comes opportunity,” she said. “But only if you’re really mindful about how you respond. Your behaviour matters. Your mindset matters.”
She’s not blind to the pressures Brixton is under now. She sees them daily. But she doesn’t see decline — she sees a cycle.
“I genuinely believe Brixton will come through this,” she told me. “There’s an energy here that’s outstanding. I don’t think enough of London recognises what Brixton offers.”
For Mel, resilience isn’t abstract. It shows up in consistency: staying open all day, keeping staff supported, refusing to lower standards when things get tough. It’s the belief that places like Brixton don’t disappear — they recalibrate.
And if you get your mindset right, she says, “it becomes a happy place to be again.”
One of Ours
Like so many Brixtonians, we arrive as outsiders, fall in love with a building, a culture, a Brixton thing and realise that instead of changing it, we need to not only preserve but continue its story. The laundry that once cleaned Park Lane’s finest linen now serves some of South London’s finest food.
After 119 years on Coldharbour Lane, the laundry is still doing what it was always meant to do: bringing us together.
THE LAUNDRY 374 Coldharbour Lane, Brixton, SW9 8PL Open daily 8:30am - 9:30pm La Perro happy hour: 5pm - 7pm
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