My life as a dumpster-diving, bin-rooting, skiptomaniac
Like Paul McCartney, I have been pulling other people's unwanted junk out of the trash for decades. This is some of the incredible stuff I have found. (Just call me Mr. Dumpster Fire)
May I offer an edited inventory of stuff I have found on my various dumpster diving skip-scavenging missions over the past decade or so?
A navy blue, fully functioning, Globetrotter suitcase, a very chic 1970s Roberts radio complete with polished wooden surround, an Artemide “Tolomeo” floor lamp (rrp £650), a chunky-handsome Marantz amplifier (working perfectly) a fantastic 3’ x 4’ London Underground map from the 1960s (framed) a cashmere scarf from Johnsons of Elgin, three cashmere sweaters, a Makita mitre saw, at least four (now flourishing) house plants, an as-new Weber barbecue, a Sony 32” TV with matching Sony DVD player and a pair of JBL speakers.
There’s more. A genuine, Herbert Terry angle poise lamp, a Braun alarm clock, a Pashley Post Office bicycle, a lovely old wooden breakfast tray now given a new lease of life…with the contents of one of the 20 or so 3/4-full cans of pricy Farrow and Ball paint I dug out of another skip. My office is cooled by a swanky Dyson fan which I found in a Mayfair dumpster. Then there’s the matching Gucci suit bag and suitcase from the 1970s found Chelsea and the two Zero Haliburton suitcases in aluminium (Zero Halliburton being the Rimowa of the 1990s) that I skip-dived for back in the early noughties. A few Decembers back, I came across a tall and healthy, spruce Christmas tree left for dead outside a swanky London house. It was only the 18th but the owners had already done with Xmas and gone off to the Caribbean. The yule tree, found a new home in my sitting room.
More “hoard” content? In my ex-wife’s wardrobe there are two Herve Leger dresses discovered - swing-tags still attached - in black bin bags at the end of our road. (Why would anyone do that?) On the book shelf is a signed, first edition hardback copy of Sam Haskins “Cowboy Kate”, currently fetching around £300 on the specialist market, but found in a pile of literary trash on Fifth Avenue, New York back in the noughties. A similarly acquired 1st edition of a David Hamilton photography book became a Christmas gift for an appreciative friend last year.
While I write this article I am being kept warm by a massive, 6ft tall upright wall radiator, that would have cost around £900 but was snarfed for free from a skip a few yards from my home. In my little loo/washroom, the white porcelain sink, the chrome, china-topped taps, the elegantly distressed mirror and chrome towel rail were all skip finds. And you really have no idea how painful it was to walk away from an immaculate Smeg fridge freezer abandoned in Notting Hill the other day, knowing that I just didn’t have any use for it.
I realised just how chronic my skiptomania condition had become when I spotted a wooden high chair (Stokke, rrp 200 quid) left on a street corner. No chips or stains. I took it home; dab of Fairy Liquid on the seat and legs, a quick tighten up of the Allen bolts, and it was like new. And then I remembered that I didn’t actually have a baby. My kids are all grown up. (They sit for dinner on proper, adult chairs. Bent-wood French café / Thonet ones that I found in a skip a few years back if you’re interested.) Still, I couldn’t get rid of such an A+ condition, premium item and that wooden high seat was been lying in the back of my car for more than a year. Then my friend’s girlfriend got pregnant and got a nice gift from me.
Skiptomania / Dumpsterism, you see, isn’t like conventional shopping. It's a long game that requires nerve, dedication, indignity and an upside down mind-set working a materialistically skew-whiff operational mode. Instead of asking yourself what you need and then going out and buy it, you happen on something attractive and think, how can I (and should I really?) incorporate this into my life? There’s a risk too. A lot of the things you acquire might have been jettisoned for a good reason - usually that they are broken or not functioning unfortunately, the fabulously cool Arcam reel-to-reel tape player I once liberated proved to be unrepairable. Ditto various strimmers and hoovers and drills.
What else have I have learned from decades of diving? That rich people are the most wasteful and unemotional (brand new books and classic vinyl records slung without a thought or care). The new fashion for leaving stuff on the pavement, with a sign that says “Free. Please Take” is actually a crafty form of fly-tipping and hardly ever yields anything of value or quality. No one cares about CDs, DVDs or hi-fi anymore, so just help yourself. Old IKEA furniture is worthless, flimsy junk. Discarded house plants just need a bit of re-potting, love and water to make them live again. Clothes and even rugs can be washed. International diving is fun - Paris, new York, LA and Tokyo have all been good to me. Most electric things chucked away actually still work. The Airbnb economy has created its own marketplace of regularly, chucked out booty and you may never need to buy a steam iron, drying rack or ironing board ever again. Yes, people moving on or gutting houses just want to get shot of stuff, pronto…but it’s always best to ask first.
Sometimes, you do get exceptionally lucky. The other day I visited the local municipal dump and, on parking up in my allotted bay, discovered a flat tyre on my Land Rover. A guy in hi-viz, working at the facility, walked up and said, “You won’t believe it, but someone just dumped off a wheel and tyre just like that.” I gave him a tenner and he let me have the good-as-new wheel. Even the rim colour was a match for my other three.
Why do I do all this? I’m really not sure. I’m not particularly poor. I’m not eco-obsessed. But I am tirelessly resourceful (or “tight” as others might term it) and consistently thrilled at the idea of getting something for nothing. I think it is safe to say that my junk habit even informed my choice when I bought a car – my Series 3 Land Rover, has an open and capacious rear end and can easily swallow up a three seater sofa, whole. Which it once did, of course.
Dumpster work requires preparation; I stow a set of basic tools in the back – screwdrivers, leather work gloves, a claw hammer etc. - in case I see a bit of choice door furniture still attached to a chucked away door and need to jemmy it off. I don’t really have a method or specialist area of interest. I scavenge and then think. If I see something I half-like, I take it. Then I have a look at it back home and decide whether it will be useful or not. If it’s broken beyond repair, smelly or just pig ugly, and gets rejected (rare, I’m afraid to say) I am at least noble enough not to take it back to the skip where I found it and dispose of it elsewhere (legally) myself.
Everyone I know is quietly horrified by my embarrassingly déclassé habit but, I’ll tell them, all the best people like to skip scavenge. Did you know, for instance, that the bowling alley at the Shoreditch House members club, was rescued by Soho House proprietor Nick Jones (well, ok, Nick Jones’ people) from a skip outside Roman Abramovich’s place after the former Chelsea FC oligarch had ordered it to be ripped out of his Kensington basement? Even gazillionaire Paul McCartney is not averse to a bit of sidewalk salvage activity either.
I once talked to Sir Paul about this at a party and he was keen to share his adventures with me. “Mmm. What’s the best thing I’ve ever found in a skip?” mused Macca. “ I’d say, a chuuur, back in the 80s. ” To this day, he told me, the boss Beatle sits in that same leather chuuur (chair), rescued at his own famous hand from a Dean Street skip, whenever he’s up in town for business at his Soho Square office .
Macca in his Soho Square office. Could this be the very same famous “churr” he fished out of a skip in the 1980s? (or maybe it’s that leather one over his shoulder?)
My own skiptomania started way back in the 1980s also. Inspired by my friend Tom Dixon who had a famously keen eye for disowned crud - a fab, 1950s, American kitchen, a handsome Arne Jacobsen chair picked up outside an advertising agency west end etc - I would go on regular drive-and-dive cruises around key London areas looking for free swag.
Back then, before congestion charging and before eBay and Google and 1st Dibs turned everyone into a rabidly over-appraising “vintage” expert, you could find truly incredible stuff. Black leather and chrome was the thing and Soho offices would sling out lots of out-moded (now highly prized) mid-20th century classics – lamps, chairs, desks etc to make way for nasty, ersatz Bauhaus clobber. “But that golden age of skip hunting has long gone, I think,” says Tom Dixon. “These days it’s all old computer equipment and unwanted (i.e. non flat-screen) tellies isn’t it?” Nowadays, Tom admits he has become a provider rather than a scavenger.
When Dixon moved from his Vauxhall studio, a few years back, he filled a huge skip with stuff – old furniture prototypes and lots of mangled metal junk. “It was emptied by scavengers overnight,” he says. “One of the bits ended up in auction and sold for £16,000.”
Certain areas are still good for different sorts of booty. Soho is where you find pukka office gear and hi-fi. Mayfair, Belgravia, even Cork Street, are all good for the odd oil-on-canvas. I check out the back streets around Sloane Street and Kings Road shops for unwanted shelves and fittings. For lamps and furniture I stick to posh residential postcodes – Chelsea, Notting Hill, Holland Park, South Kensington etc - because this is where people tend to be the most profligate, coldly unsentimental and just plain lazy when it comes to fixing stuff.
Properties in these locales are also prone to frequent make-overs where interiors will be totally gutted and virtually everything that is vaguely “old” binned in big yellow metal boxes outside.
The contemporary yuppies’ penchant for brushed-steel and whitewashed minimalism is a great provider for the dedicated skip-hunter. Wealthy Russians, in particularly, seem to hate anything that isn’t nightclub-flashy and bling-tastically new. Fortunately for me, there are lots of rich Novi-Ruskis moving in near to my flat.
Time to put my diving gloves on again.