Packaging

Pyrex Mug / Cream Crackers / Colman’s Mustard / Priory Tea / Spice Girls Chocolates / Spotted parcel tape / Birds Instant Whip / Brillo /  Russian Hairbrush / Hornby Trains / Artesque Photographic Paper Snuff tins Marx Sooper Snooper toy1950s Easter Egg boxes Airfix Betta Bilda sets / Costello’s Ladies Outfitter Hull Kodak Brownie 44A Camera Outfit, Lemfizz sherbet sweets Birds Eye packaging, Polaroid Swinger camera box
Schofields, Leeds, hat box,  Vintage Lego accessory set 314 from 1963,   Horniman’s Tea, Vintage Christmas packaging, Airfix Robin kit 1978, Ilford Photographic Boxes, Joseph Pickering box, Victory V Lozenges 1920s,  Vintage Nylon Stocking packets, Vintage Christmas Biscuit tins, 1960s Coca Cola bottle carriers, Britain’s Model soldier 1960s,

LATEST – Frog toy kit MG1100 car, Corgi Toys Commer van gift set 1965, Peek Frean Playbox Biscuit tin,

There’s something about packaging which fascinates me. Design and printing techniques, construction, materials – all that work and effort going into producing something which is torn open and disposed of. At best it gets recycled. At worst is blows around the countryside or back streets until it decomposes. They pulled a neat cup-de-sac of 1930s semis down a few years ago not far from here. Built behind the hospital as houses for staff, the land was needed for an extension. Mooching round, I discovered one of the garages full of salvaged packaging materials. Piles of brown paper neatly folded and tied with string. Bundles of string tied up with string. Old washing up liquid bottles with brown tape stuck on ready for relabelling. Cardboard boxes which had once been used to bring home shopping from the local grocers. The survivors of this endless chain of manufacture are here mostly by accident, sometimes as reminders of a less disposable age when people did put such things aside for reuse. The ‘it’ll come in handy’ mentality. There are also rare 78 rpm Columbia and HMV shipping boxes on our sister site ST33.

Lots of our photographs are now available for commercial use via our photo library.