The Mother Load

25th June 2025

From what am I going to make it?

From wood! Obviously. Street wood. Wood that I find in bins, outside properties being renovated, discarded round corners of the city... I really get a kick out of finding rubbish that I know I can repurpose. It's like finding money. Creatively it is also stimulating to have the constraints of having to use what I've got or only what I can find. 

Recently I found the mother load. It was this that triggered this whole wild idea to build a gallery. 

I saw this one morning on Parkway (Camden). I couldn't pass it by without having a good look. When I started taking stock of what was there, I started to salivate. 'Good golly Miss Molly!' screamed the Little Richard who lives in my head. I had had the idea of making a gallery already but this was quite the offering being made by the Bin Lords. I knocked on doors and managed to find the man in charge of the wood. He told me I could have whatever I wanted and it was going to be skipped in an hour. This was like giving me a time-bomb. 

I walked off and tried to lower my heartbeat and regain my senses. Was it preposterous to take all this wood with the aim of building a gallery with it?! Would I just end up with a tonne of junk that I'd have to spend time taking to the tip after it had taken up lots of valuable space, stubbing my toe on it and crawling around it for weeks only to end up on the trash heap? I marched around for an hour in Camden, my head rushing and racing with ideas and possibilities. 'It's now or never, you haven't got all day'. I had to make a decision quick. It wasn't something that I could analyse, weigh up and evaluate with the best wood experts in a summit. I had to shoot from the hip. I felt so much pressure - I really felt as if I was looking at my destiny, staring at the orb of enlightenment: this decision would be pivotal in revealing to me whether I'm a madman or a genius. If it went wrong I would feel humiliated and ashamed. If i ended up being used, I would feel like a visionary. 

I stood at the door of my studio, holding my keys up towards the lock and said to myself "You have to decide now".

Yeah fuck it, let's do it.  

I had taken the foreman's number and messaged him that I'm coming down. I didn't get a reply and I called him and he didn't pick up. As I set off to fetch my trusty 2010 Citroen C3 Picasso VTR from home, I worried that the skip may have already turned up. After panicking about that for a while, I realised that I had to mentally prepare myself for it not being there when I arrived. One part of me was rushing with excitement at the propsect of all that lovely free wood and another part of me was trying to quell my excitement just in case I was about to face the disappointment of it no longer being there. 

I pulled round the crossroads at Parkway and there it still was! Wood-ho! I moved the traffic cones put out to reserve the spot for the skip lorry and pulled up right next to it, pulled on my gloves and started foraging. 

I was acutely aware that I was playing jenga with 2 tonnes of nail-ridden wood and really didn't want to have it crashing down on me. There were pieces that I wanted right at the bottom of the heap. I crouched down and traced back where the weight of the wood was sitting so I could shuffle bits around to relieve the pieces that I wanted. I had half loaded my car and had been spending 10 minutes heaving and trying to get the bits at the bottom that I wanted. At this point a fellow scavenger turned up. Boots but no gloves. Amateur. He said 'I don't speak English' and was gesturing that he wanted some wood. I told him, in the spirit of wood scavenging that it was a free-for-all. Clearly I'd done all the work finding the foreman and moving 50 or so crappy pieces into a separate pile to give access to the good shit. Then this random comes along and wants to take all the glory. 

As I stepped away from the pile to load the boot, the guy has moved to my end of the pile that I've been working on for 20 minutes now and is weighing up what he wants. I take a moment to assess what the etiquette here is - it's all free and it's not mine so in a way he can now filch whatever even if I feel like I've been working for certain bits. 

I think to myself '... If it gets heated, I have an axe in my car...' *thinking monocle emoji

'No, don't axe the guy, that would be an over-reaction.' Unnecessary. Anyway, false alarm as the guy keeps to his end. 

I can see him struggling and getting frustrated. He takes a couple of pieces and then gives up. Hasn't got the staying power of a true professional like me. I'm there for 30 minutes at least busting my guts. 

There are still 4 or 5 bits of 18mm plywood right at the bottom of the stack that I haven't been able to free of the weight of the pile. This is when Rambo comes out. The foreman. He is a nice Romanian guy and helps out with my death-defying game of jenga. I tell him what I'm working for and he nonchalantly tells me we can easily free those pieces. He starts tugging at the bits (no gloves) with his dusty working hands and lo and behold, avoids tumbling the tower and frees the bits I was working towards. Magic! I load the car right to the roof with wood. It is a beautiful sight. I exchange some parting words with Rambo and pull the car out onto Parkway, turning right onto Albert Street and head off into the sunset with my kill.