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
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Antiques roadie show
By Annabel Freyberg, Photo. by Marcus Peel
Antiques dealers spring from the unlikeliest sources. Take Dean Gipson. His initiation in the subject stems from his time as a roadie with rock groups in the early 1980s – starting with Pink Floyd’s The Wall tour. ‘We used to do overnight drives, turning up in towns at five or six in the morning.
That’s how I got into markets – I’d see crowds of people, go and have a look, and buy a few trinkets.’ Even today, he believes that early morning is the best time to look round a place, especially one he has never been to before, but also more familiar ones. ‘At that time you can see a hell of a lot in half an hour,’ he says. ‘I go to New York every four weeks and sometimes drive around at four in the morning.’
Gipson has moved a long way from trinkets – he now has an impressive London showroom in a former Chelsea gas works stuffed to the gills with grand and gorgeous 19th- and 20th-century lanterns, mirrors
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