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Roar of approval for a quirky Viking 'invasion'
From hospital bricks to stately home gate posts, there's little South Yorkshire architectural salvage site Viking Reclamation can't reclaim, as Star reporter Rachael Clegg found out...
A ROMANESQUE temple, a knight’s suit of armour, a 1960s petrol pump and a Victorian toilet - Craig Lloyd’s stocklist sounds like a museum catalogue.
But tucked away in the very un-museum-like setting of an industrial hamlet in Armthorpe, Doncaster, is South Yorkshire’s quirkiest collection of home and garden miscellania - a Wizard of Oz version of B&Q.
And while it all sounds very make-believe, it’s big business and it’s hard graft.
Craig’s firm Viking Reclamation, which he runs with site manager Rob Duxbury, specialises in buying, cleaning up, and selling materials from demolition sites or derelict buildings across the country.
Their store is a wonderland of architectural remnants, interiors fittings and building materials, like props from a period drama. Every brick, stone and gargoyle has a story.
“See this here,” says Craig, pointing to a photograph of a church window in Ripon. “We took that, brought it back in here, and an ex art teacher bought it. He then bought another one and built his own ‘ruin’ in his Lincolnshire garden.”
He illustrates his tale with a photo of an idyllic ruin, much like that in a William Turner or John Constable painting. And many of his goods have travelled much further than Lincolnshire.
“I’ve just sent off two suits of armour to America and one to Norway to a deep sea diver,” he says.
Craig wanders outside to the yard, to a pile of bricks taken from Birch Hill Hospital across the Pennines in Rochdale. His prize find was a set of doors from the pub he frequented as a 17-year-old in Liverpool.
“I acquired the original doors from my old local when I was 17. I walked through those doors, I’d been chucked out of those doors, I’d taken girls through those doors - I thought I couldn’t ever sell them.
“But eventually a developer wanted to buy them. She kept asking and asking after them, so I put a daft price on them and sold them. It would have been stupid to hold on to them.”
His other gems include a treasure hunt map behind a desk in his office. “I bought this when a school was being knocked down, it was in the headmaster’s office. It’s a really old map, when Thailand was called Siam.”
Locally though his most significant find was the gates from the old Doncaster fruit market. “They’re in our yard now but I’ve sold them to a man in Lincoln who’s had a wall built especially at the back of his house so he can put them in.”
Craig has also had some of his pieces auctioned off at prestige saleroom Sothebys. “We had two huge pillars from a stately home that were auctioned off - we get a lot of stuff from stately homes.”
Walking round Viking Reclaim and exploring the fragments from the past is fascinating. Huge oak church doors lean against the wall, Victorian fireplaces are aplenty and old school cast iron radiators stand in rows of 10 or 12. But in an era when plasma tellies and minimalist furniture’s all the rage, the decorative wonders of a bygone age aren’t to everyone’s taste.
“Having the foresight to see what can be done with some of these things is definitely a talent,” says Craig.
“Rob, who manages the business, has a real knack for spotting something and being able to visualise what it will look like when it’s cleaned up and used in a proper context.”
The reclaiming process is not easy, however, especially when it comes to building materials.
“People think second-hand bricks should be cheaper than new bricks, but what they forget is we have to find them, collect them, transport them - sometimes for hundreds of miles - clean them up and put them onto palettes.”
But, it seems as long as there are characters with unique taste, Craig will always be in business.
“Sometimes you buy things and they can sit there for two or three years, then, all of a sudden, the right person comes along and they’ll buy it. We do get some oddballs coming in here but I tend to get on with them!”
Many of Craig’s customers are repeat buyers suffering from the ‘bug’ - always wanting something a bit different in their homes.
“Customers will do one room and then they’ll come back and want to do another room,” he says.
And unfortunately the unique taste and specific requirements for rare architectural features does breed a black market which, Craig says, the company tries to avoid.
“We are part of the Salvo code, we always keep sellers’ details, and we receive theft alerts. We did buy
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Saturday 26 May 2012
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