Antiques roadie show

Dean Gipson started picking up trinkets while on tour with rock bands and ended up with a collection that filled his house. Now it’s all going under the hammer.

Dean Gipson at his London showroom, in a former gas works in Chelsea, with his whippets Minnie and Mouse His home is a splendid mixture of Edwardian shop, Regency house and 1970s extension. Gipson has lived there for 10 years and did a considerable amount of work when he first moved in, shifting balconies, putting in a three-storey conservatory and light wells. The layout is largely open-plan and somewhat eccentric – you have to go through the main bedroom to get to the spare ones – and it now needs a new roof and damp course. As Gipson admits, ‘The builders couldn’t get anywhere or do anything with all the stuff in there. The ceiling is 15ft high in the main 100ft-long living-room – I like big urns, I need big ceilings – and some of the objects high up had seven years of dust on them. You don’t realise how much junk you’ve got.’ (His idea of junk being rather different from most people’s.) ‘I don’t need all that stuff now – when I was starting out it was like having a pension fund.’ Gipson has been selling things since he was a small boy – his family were costermongers who bought their produce at Spitalfields, and he was working at fruit and vegetable markets by the age of eight in towns such as Hemel Hempstead and Dorking. Later on, in 1984, after four or five years of touring with rock bands, he came off the road and took his ‘trinkets’ to Camden Lock market, where a friend had a stall. He was staggered to make £300 – ‘a lot of money in those days’ – which was when he realised there was a living in antiques. ‘I was very interested in seeing what people picked up,’ he says, ‘and in the hunt – not knowing what you’re going to find. That’s still the big thrill.’ Within a week or two, he had his own stall, and within six months a shop in Kentish Town, rented through the tour manager of Duran Duran for £25 a week.

At first he dealt in pine and gilt mirrors, buying from auctions all over London. ‘There was one in the East End where you bid in 10 pences,’ he remembers fondly. Gradually his taste evolved. ‘I loved the decorative stuff. I remember seeing these baroque pieces I couldn’t afford but thought were fabulous.’ He decided to search further afield, got £500 together and went to Paris in a van, filled it and returned. The pattern was set – and he followed it every week for the next 10 years. ‘I’d go on a Friday afternoon,’ he explains, ‘and spend Saturday at the flea markets and Sunday at the street markets.’ After a few years he left Kentish Town for a warehouse in Bermondsey, where he did so well in five years his rent was doubled, at which point he moved on to Camden Passage in Islington – the borough where he grew up. Here he spent the next decade selling to Americans and for export, and started sending container loads to the States. He still goes to France regularly, flying to the south every four or five weeks, but he hasn’t been to Paris for years. These days he is more interested in the English countryside, and plans to buy a house in Herefordshire, where his girlfriend Vicky Carr, a shoe designer, comes from. She, meanwhile, has been promised some say in the new decor of the Islington house – though typical antiques dealer that he is, Gipson reveals sheepishly, ‘I’ve already started to take new stuff back home.’

For the moment, Gipson is enjoying the novelty of living with lots of space, and nervously looking forward to the sale. Apart from a few fixtures – the fireplace he put into the sitting-room; a glorious marbled French, early 19th-century, double-ended cast-iron bath; a hippo skull he and Carr bought recently – he is selling everything, including the cacti in his garden urns and his blue Mercedes (he will still have his gold one, which needs a new engine). The nervousness comes from the fact that it is all being sold without reserve, which may or may not mean bargains. He is not planning to be at the sale himself, but old habits die hard. Along with the ranks of 19th-century urns, obelisks, mirrors, tazze, columns and candlesticks are a selection of ‘one-off things – like the pair of pressed, zinc heads of pigs; you see lots of horses, but I’ve never seen pigs again’. He pauses for a nanosecond. ‘Maybe I’ll buy one back.’ Gipson’s Grand Tour: The Dean Gipson Collection will be sold at Christie’s South Kensington on November 16 (020-7930 6074; christies.com)