Going, going, gone: a collector's life in 568 lots

Barrow boy, rock roadie and now international antiques dealer Dean Gipson tells Nick Curtis why he's selling up
HE STARTED out selling fruit and veg from his parents' East End stall, left school at 14 with no qualifications, and became a roadie for the likes of ZZ Top and The Who. Now, at 45, Dean Gipson is an internationally known antiques dealer with showrooms in New York and London, and he is about to sell off his life.

Since he started his business as a hobby, trawling early-morning European flea markets after all-night drives between AC/DC gigs, Gipson has hung on to almost as many 19th-century busts and thrones and urns and obscure objects as he has sold, to the point where builders cannot gain access to repair the roof of his Islington townhouse. So it's all going, in a sale of 568 lots expected to raise Pounds 1 million, representing one man's unique taste in a lifetime of collecting, at Christie's tomorrow.

Well, almost all of it is going. "Christie's wanted the kitchen sink as well," says Gipson, "and the 1820 Regence bathtub, and the white-marble, claw-foot fireplace. But I said no." It remains an extraordinary collection. Gipson's friend, gardener and designer Monty Don, calls it "exhilarating, challenging and humming with energy. Just like Dean, in fact." It is a totally eclectic assemblage. The curious buyer could, for instance, purchase a pair of plaster pigs' heads dating from around 1880, which once adorned a French boucherie and which for 20 years have hung on the door between Gipson's kitchen and his larder, since he bought them from a Seine-side flea market in a village outside Paris.

Or there's the headless, articulated 1860s mannequin that stood in his hallway - rare in that it is almost life-sized, and one of many that Gipson used in window displays in his shops in Kentish Town, Bermondsey and Camden Passage, before he settled on his current premises in Chelsea's Core 1 Centre. There are the bronze French busts of Caesar Augustus and Voltaire, or the crown - it once adorned a Madonna in an Italian church - which Gipson perched on a marble head of Apollo in his cluttered 100ft living room.

There's the late 18th-century terracotta tobacco jar shaped like a Chinaman, which Gipson found very hard to part with ("he sat on my mantelpiece and his face always made me feel happy") and sundry canine collectables, from dogheaded walking sticks to a Victorian painted terracotta pug with its own 20thcentury kennel ("What can I say? I like dogs, and doggy stuff is always saleable").

MUCH of Gipson's private collection reflects his taste in "18th- century Grand Tour memorabilia and Empire busts and statues". But there are also huge copper floodlights from the Hydrel Corporation in California, of the 1960s, which sat by the desk in his spare room. Or the 1971 Lapis blue Mercedes 280 coupe that Gipson bought six years ago, and restored. He is at a loss to describe how his taste developed: "I've just learned on the job - I certainly wasn't trained." He was born in Islington. His costermonger father ran fruit and veg stalls in Dorking, Braintree and Hemel Hempstead, where Dean would help on Saturdays, then Fridays, then Thursdays, until he left school altogether.

In the Seventies, food markets also sold bric-a-brac and clothing. At these he bought his first Grand Tour souvenirs - models of the Eiffel Tower and Arc de Triomphe. Then, when he was 17, his printer brother got him a backstage job on Pink Floyd's The Wall tour, on its lengthy stops in Earls Court and Dortmund. Thus began his second career as a roadie. "The Simon and Garfunkel tour was the nicest one, much more chilled than all the heavy metal guys," he says. Did the partying on tour with headbangers take it out of him?

"It wasn't the partying, it was the constant overnight travelling between gigs. It's really hard graft. Often, wired after driving through the night, I'd end up hunting around the early morning markets. I sold the first load I brought back, mostly knickknacks, on a friend's stall, and made about Pounds 300 or Pounds 400 profit, which was quite a lot of money then. I realised I could do this full time. The girlfriend of Duran Duran's tour manager was giving up a shop in Camden and I managed to rent it, and started out selling, mostly stripped pine stuff and gilt mirrors." While he has moved hrough steadily larger and more prestigious premises, recently adding shops in New York and Connecticut, the north London home he shares with his shoe-designer girl friend Vicki Carr, his 18-year-old daughter Holly, and their whippets Mouse and Mini has teadily filled up. "The private collection started out as sort of a savings plan," he says. "Christie's has been asking me for years to sell. Now I just don't have any space to move. I need to get the roof repaired and the builders can't gain access. I'm always away at weekends travelling to France, Italy or America buying things to sell, and you get worried if the alarm goes off: it's almost impossible to insure this amount of stuff. So this summer I changed my mind. It's not for the money. I just like the idea of starting with a clean slate."