The Brunswick House APRIL SALE

Don't miss our April Sale!

1st - 30th

In celebration of our 1st anniversary at Brunswick House.

10% off all stock, with further reductions on selected items.

Reclaimed flooring, doors & door furniture, baths, radiators, metalwork, kitchenware, lighting, Relics of Old London and much, much more.

ONLY at Brunswick House, Vauxhall.

Why not take this opportunity to visit our historic premises and be inspired!


In conjunction with Evening Standard's Homes & Property

For further information call 020 7501 7772. Open Mon to Sat, 10am - 5pm

LES SMITH 1960 - 2005

LES SMITH 1960 – 2005

Les Smith worked with LASSCO for many years and was noted both for his rudeness and his gourmandising.

He died in 2005 at the age of 45 and a memorial was unveiled at St Michael’s on 22nd March 2006.

Adrian Amos gave the following eulogy:-

Ladies and Gentlemen,

It’s Les’s Birthday today and getting on for a year since he died. And so we all thought that it would be an appropriate day to unveil our little memorial to him, next to our old friend Peter, both long associated with this building, both under the wings of the Archangel Michael himself, to whom this church is dedicated.

I personally would not, this afternoon, be surprised to hear Les’s voice echoing through the building – he’d probably be pointing out in that blunt way of his that I “shouldn’t get too cocky – there’s lots of room for more under St. Michael’s wings.”

He was so much part of our lives and of this building that his presence still could, when you think about it, be just around the corner.

I find it a bit uncanny.

Well as he became part of our lives so shall we make him with this tablet part of this building – we’ve actually attached him to the masonry itself.

And by virtue of the preservation afforded by Parliamentary Statute Les has now, in a manner of speaking, become part of its fabric – for ever – protected by the full weight of the law.

And let’s stay with this image…imagine a spring morning in the year 2506. A postgraduate student of the Antique is puzzling over this time-worn and virtually illegible epitaph clutching her Latin dictionary in her hand…

ABITE… PRANDEO*

(Cupping her hand to her ear)
Is that an impatient snort from within?

(Sniffing)
Is that the heavenly smell of sausage, bacon, egg, black pudding, beans and a fried slice (in beef dripping of course)?

(Again cupping her hand to her ear)
What’s that voice from the Sepulchre?

(A sharp retort…)
BOOGGER OFF…I’M HAVING ME BREAKFAST*

May the souls of our dear departed rest in eternal peace.

Amen

Design and Letter cutting by Lois Anderson
Gold and Colour on Slate
Miss Anderson will be happy to undertake similar commissions

Fragments of Brunswick's Past

Fragments of tickets, notices and bottle labels, dating back to 1884, were found discarded and crumpled under some floorboards at Brunswick House yesterday.

Perhaps the most interesting is that of a handwritten notice informing members of the Railwayman's Club of plans to form an Orchestral Society. To be directed by Mr E.H. Howell, Band Master of 2nd London Rifle Volunteers. Practice to commence Tuesday 2nd December 1884. The year, incidentally, that the first edition of The Oxford English Dicitionary was published and the corner stone of the Statue of Liberty laid on Bedloe's Island in New York Harbor.

Although of little intrinsic value, these fragments of a bygone age provide a small, yet fascinating, glimpse into the everyday lives of our Brunswick predecessors.

PRESS CUTTING : Front Page of The Independent Property Section, "Saving Grace", 08.03.06

PRESS CUTTING : "Save and Salvage" Period Ideas Magazine, March 2006

Retracing LASSCO's past - Press cutting - The Guardian, 1988

Sifting through our vast archives the other day, we happened upon a rather amusing article on the world of reclamation - an extract of which is attached below. Although written some years ago, we think you'll agree, Salvage has lost none of its appeal!

"The Saving airs and graces: It started with scavenging in skips. Now recycled architecture is big business

Adrian Amos, the founder of the London Architectural Salvage and Supply Company, said his family, long in cabinet-making, begen to get customers pleading about a decade ago for substitutes for doors flung out in the Barry Bucknell DIY years. "The skips were terribly tempting. The waste then was severe. We rescued things from the street, and drifted into this...": this being a disused church nearish to Spitalfields where Mr Amos sat, with ledgers, at a high and dusty desk under the rags of a fine 18th century portrait, and dealt most courteously with tattooed and portly gentlemen offering him the pickings of the sites.

Is it still coming in, I asked incredulously, thinking that by now - with a decent brass doorknob going for an average £10 almost nationwide - nothing could be left to extract and sell? Mr Amos, who speaks in the strong, tract prose of an early preacher, answered with a conducted tour down the aisles.

That tall pair of portals was the work of Robert Adam, bought only last week from a house wantonly torn down in old Park Lane; it had had only a Victorian facade and thus had not been spared; the marble pedestals were ex-British Museum; and the complete panelled Tudor room had been lurking inside a bugalow in Godalming. (LASSCO's nave has a Gothic-shocker-movie feeling: a lot of us have childhoods full of British thrillers shot in warehouses full of displaced cherubs and school-prize plaques. And Citizen Kane was the greatest recycler since Bramante.)

From beneath his pinned-up membership cards of the Georgian Society, he delivered a sermon which, Cobbett-like, began with approval of the honesty of the appropriate fire fuel, and swelled into an oration on the power of harmonious architecture to improve lives. A lad butted in to ask how much a famous architect's firm would have to pay to hire a column capital for an exhibition: "Did you say Ove Arup? They have done us all no favours. £80."

By Veronica Horwell, 1988