Upcycling Heaven in Cornwall

I was visiting my native Cornwall in 2011 and, while on a walk between Helston and Porthleven via Penrose Walks and Loe Bar, I found a wonderland of junk!  Wreckers Studio is in Porthleven and is, I suspect, actually someone's back garden rather than a reclaim yard. But just look at how some of the junk has been arranged to make faces and other forms. I love places like these as they are full of the raw materials I can use for making sculptures.

It was, sadly, closed that day. All I know about it is that it's run by Steve and Paul Williams. 

It reminded me of one of my favourite places to visit, now sadly closed down. It was near Penzance, between Long Rock and Marazion, and was called Shiver Me Timbers. The place consisted of acres of tumbledown shacks and sheds overflowing with marvelous junk. 

It was a thing of beauty.

I've bought a few things from there over the years, including a pair of Spanish trawler fishing floats which the owner told me had been 'cut off one of their bastard poaching nets'. That was the sort of tall story that Terry 'Trader Gray' used to tell all the time. I met him many times and there was a story attached to every item. He built the place up into what he called his 'museum of oddities and wonder'. 

When he died in 2009, his son Joe took over the business. However, in 2011 the landowner decided to sell the site to a property developer and Joe shifted what he could some three miles down the road to Crowlas and the Truthwall Industrial Estate where it now operates from. 

It has a website and a Facebook page and is still doing good business thanks to the current vogue for upcycling old furniture. But it is a shadow of its former chaotic and magical self.

For more brilliant pictures of the old site in its heyday do visit John Stumbles' excellent webpage about the place.