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