Charles Brooking
The Home Museum
Gets Too Big
The following is one of a series of interviews with Charles Brooking, Historic and Listed Buildings Detail Expert, The Brooking Collection of Architectural Detail and a Surveyor where we have recorded his comments and various aspects that have affected windows and doors and other collectibles. The interviews outline how his collection started and built over the years and gives an insight into the amazing architectural features housed in his fine collection.
Surveyor: Your rescued architectural detail collection at home was getting rather large?
Charles Brooking : Yes, understandably from the point of view of my parents it was getting too large! I was filling up everywhere. It was getting beyond a joke. We had I suppose a shanty town of covered up stuff at the side of the front garden!
Rescue defined
Charles Brooking defines a rescue as saving a window or door or staircase that would be doomed.
Charles Brooking was a pioneer in the rescue of architectural detailing as many years ago it was very much considered a strange and an unusual past time to want to rescue old parts of buildings with everything new and shiny being so important.
Surveyor: So in numbers, how many windows and doors did you have at your parents?
Charles Brooking : Well I suppose hundreds of items but large items I suppose must be getting on for two hundred to three hundred in terms of packs stacked in.
Surveyor: Two hundred to three hundred doors and windows?
Charles Brooking : Mainly doors, windows, fire grates and staircase baluster, yes. I mean looking at it from my parents point of view I can see the problem. I was very single minded, somewhat selfish about it and dedicated. Of course when you are single minded and passionate you don't always see other people's opinions. There was nowhere else I could store it and to my way of thinking there was this orgy of destruction, so one was driven by that.
Surveyor: Yes and your friends stepped in the Meads?
Charles Brooking: Well I met Alan Mead at the Coutts Bank site in 1970, after my 21st Birthday. I met him on site and chatted to him and he said we will help you store stuff at our house, you can come back for tea and they stored it for two years and brought it back one day when my parents were on holiday!
If you found this article on The Brooking Collection of Architectural Detail interesting you may also be nterested in the following articles on our website:
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Adding value to your property
References:
TheBrookingCollection.com DartfordArchive.org.uk IHBC.org.uk ProjectBook.co.uk
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