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| Ice Factory and Cold Stores |
I
first met Ron Scott in the midst of his hoards at closing time. “Have you got a long list of questions for
me?” he said, expectantly. I mumbled something about “artificiality” and
“conversational flow”. I confess that at this point I half wished I had
come armed with a list entitled ‘Parrot-able lines of Enquiry’ - the cavernous store
was slightly daunting. Unruffled, Ron posed that we find somewhere to sit. I
pictured one of us perched on top of a stack of yellowing books, the other
avoiding causing an avalanche amidst the towers of china to find ‘somewhere to
sit.’ Bull, china shop, the scene dissolved (thankfully) before it
materialised. Of course, what more
fitting place for sitting than a room populated by chairs, crowded by the
better parts of some restorations and the pieces of others, like a factory for
broken and amputated limbs. Amusement crept over my face, but it seemed
(retrospectively, unsurprisingly) normal for Ron, that a room should be
furnished with options for sitting rather than provide an orchestrated setting
for a stiff-backed scene. “Take a seat”, he said. Irony absent,
this was so obviously his home.
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| A room full of chairs |
We
began, conventionally, with beginnings and somewhat unconventionally with a
lesson in manufactured refrigeration. The main thing that I took from the
initial throes of the business was ‘growth’. Ron’s father-in-law owned a small
shop in the town where Ron helped out, then the expansion of the
business saw Scott’s move from Hawley Street, to a shop in Dane Hill, until
they needed a bigger place. Expanding beyond any shop in Margate’s containment,
Scott’s spilled in to its current location, the ‘Ice Factory and Cold Stores’,
an old, converted ice works. This is
where manufactured refrigeration comes in.
As elucidated by Ron, the ice works manufactured ice up until the 1930’s
(ish) before refrigerators found their footing in family homes. Ron explained: “when, in the 1940’s commercial
refrigeration became more viable, people didn’t need ice works anymore so they
used this place as an ice store. It was like one big freezer, they used to store
all the turkeys from Monkton Turkey Farms, which is a big turkey farm down the
road. 400,000 turkeys a year and in those days they only sold turkeys at
Christmas so they froze them and stored them all here.” No trace of turkey lingered, though Ron pointed out the three foot thick fortification that edged the room we were in, “there’s 14 inches of insulation on the walls”, he said. That the building
should be steeped in history didn’t seem at odds with the objects that
surrounded me, but a production line certainly did. Every one of Ron's objects seemed to have been wrenched from their respective points of production a long time ago.
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| A-Z of Junk Deluxe |
Having
gleaned a sense of the setting, my questions began to assemble themselves
around the things within. Collecting things has always intrigued me –
particularly for its compulsive potential and the habits of order and
arrangement that it breeds. Though Scott’s is bursting at the seams, it doesn’t
seem directionless. I mean it’s acquisitive, but it certainly isn’t mindless
junk. On the website (link below), Scott’s is celebrated as a purveyor of “unusual
goods”, so my next question was “what counts as an ‘unusual item’?” Ron’s
answer: “anything that’s antique, old
fashioned, unusual, not the run of the mill, we’re not trying to compete with
any of the other furniture stores. People like to find something different, a
bit ‘off the wall.’” At this point, Ron gestured to the chairs that
surrounded us as examples of difference. There seemed such genuine satisfaction
in these items being the adverse of something else, the opposite of the
usual. Satisfaction in difference. My
thoughts switched to the eyes that populated the store outside of closing time.
Were they looking for ‘difference’ too, and was there a level of discernment,
some element of knowledge in their pursuit of the unusual? Of course, Ron
confirmed specialists are rife in their store. My question about the knowledge
of others prompted advice rather than answers: “Though we try and sell everything […], you can’t know everything about
everything. Nobody does, they tell you they do – they’re telling lies.
We try and supply all needs, cater for all different tastes.”
To
give you some background, my next question is hinged on my one and
(confessedly) only purchase from Scott’s. A black and white photograph plucked
from Ron's disordered gallery, made knowable by virtue of the caption scrawled on
the back by some now anonymous, now absent pen: Kathleen, aged 3, Dane Park,
June 1938. Half of me is intrigued by the story behind it, half of me slightly
spooked by the purchasable-ness of something that really isn’t mine to have. So
I asked, "what about house clearances – I noticed that you have a lot of old
photographs, do you know the people in them or is it a completely anonymous
collection?" “Most of the people we don’t
know in them. When we do a house clearance […] we buy the residue they don’t
want. Sometimes its just like someone’s just walked out of their house and
there’s still food in the cupboard and everything, you know. And we go in and
price the whole thing up, buy the whole thing, everything.” Though releasing people from their ‘residue’
is has become an explicable industry, the loss of the owner within the
transaction felt like it should be more momentous than Ron was letting on. I
pushed further and asked Ron whether he thought it was odd, people collecting
other people’s memories. He answered with an excitement that I think will
characterise this conversation by the time we have finished: “Odd that it’s somebody’s family? No I think
its great, people love it, especially if they’ve got a caption. For instance,
military ones, we find hundreds and hundred of pictures of a troop of soldiers,
sometimes there’s nothing, nothing at all, except on the front it might say
“Seventeenth Hussars, Bangalore” or something, you know and sometimes you turn
it over and there’ll be a list of all the men, all of them - real history… its
fantastic!”
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| Gallerification, a study of |
It
was when I asked Ron about his most unusual find that the magic of magpie-ism
really hit me. Most obviously because when I re-listened to the recording and
transcribed our talking, the largest proportion of text weighting seemed to
spout from the question of ‘most memorable find’. In brief, picture a Flemmish
corner cabinet, badly neglected – “you
know, the usual thing - chickens nesting in it” and a possessive French
owner reluctant to sell. This, faced with
a ‘Collector of Difference’, so perseverant that the aforementioned French
owner had no other option but to sell it to him. Cabinet relinquished it
subsequently arrived here in Margate at the ‘Ice Factory and Cold Stores.’ As misfortune would have it, the cabinet
would not, could not, wanted not, to fit through the door of Ron’s family home.
Elsewhere, Ron stumbled upon some great big oak doors, which he and his wife decided would go nicely on the back of
their house, to open up the space… “and
cut a long story short, my builder friend fitted the big doors on the back of
our house and once we had the big doors on, my other son said ‘that corner
cupboard’ll go through those doors Dad’ – so we brought it all the way back
down again and now its in our house and its going to stay there forever, I
think.” Of course, most objects have someone’s memory attached to them.
Some may have a series of disconnected memories attached to them by virtue of
their passing from place to place, person to person. It is not often that a
conversation between these memories is permitted – they are stilled in their
own time frames, ostracised by their separate owners. The most wonderful thing
about speaking to Ron was that the memories of an object due to stand in his
framed ‘forever’ were now seeping into our conversation and being documented by
it.
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| Bull (rhinoceros) in a china (junk) shop (emporium) |
Having
been distracted by the curiosities of collecting in general until now, our
conversation was to close on Margate. I wanted to find out about whether
Scott’s for all its sustainability and timelessness had ‘suffer(ed) sea-change.
Into something rich and strange’ alongside the landscape around it. Ron confirmed
that the revival had been a huge boost for the store, that it had become
something of a tourist attraction in itself. Speaking of attractions, we
reflected on the much praised Turner Contemporary, there was no indecision in
Ron’s affirmative – “Marvellous,
wonderful, best thing that’s ever happened to the town. Its great, I love it”. Followed
by, perhaps understandable indecision
about the curiosities that the Turner exhibits – “I don’t love all the stuff they show there, sometimes I go in and
think ‘what is this? Am I heathen or is that just a bit odd?’ but I guess
that’s what art’s all about, but I don’t know.” It would seem that every
collection, arranged to be sold or arranged to be exhibited and galleried demands
for ‘difference’ – at least of opinion!
Finally,
for Ron’s Margate, “have you always lived here?” I asked. “No I’ve been in Margate since I was 17. My parents moved to Margate and
bought a guest house when I was 17 and I was sort of dragged along (kicking and
screaming) – there were 10 streets off of Northdown road to the sea, all those
roads as you go down to the sea were guest houses of some sort – when I came
here in 1969, or whenever it was, when did I come here? – 49, 66 – 67. (I
have since realised, on re-listening to our conversation, that this sequence of
numbers is Ron calculating his date of arrival, presumably born in 1949,
arrived in Margate in 1966/67) – all
those streets, every single house would have rooms to let – bed and breakfasts
– there used to be streets and streets, coaches coming down the Thanet Way to
Margate – cor’ blimey, it was unbelievable – really busy in the late 60s early
70s, all that’s gone now. But it’s still a tourist town, just for different
reasons…”
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| Similarity in Difference |
You can find Scott’s Furniture Mart at The
Old Ice Works, Bath Place, Margate, Kent, CT9 2BN or online at
http://www.scottsmargate.co.uk/ or on Twitter @ScottsMargate
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