Category Archives: LASSCO History
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10 January 2018
Sea Containers House
LASSCO has salvaged a number of interesting items from the prominent former Bankside office, Sea Containers House, designed by Warren Platner.
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11 September 2017
From The Ground Up – Baltic Pine Flooring.
No salvage or reclamation firm in the Kingdom has as wide a selection of solid, practicable, serviceable historic and reclaimed Baltic Pine floorboards as LASSCO. If you were to enter into almost any building, commercial, public or domestic, built in Britain between the beginning of the Eighteenth Century and the end of the Last War and looked...
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12 April 2017
A Disposition To Preserve, An Ability To Improve
A recent LASSCO supplied restoration of a C17th townhouse in the West End of London demonstrates that integrity of materials combined with an eye to improvement are the key ingredients in the enhancement and restoration of ancient buildings. Much like a piece of antique furniture, once wooden floors reach a certain age they all have an inherent...
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29 March 2017
Take Back Control
LASSCO’s in house carpenter creates one-off items of furniture combining integrity of materials with admirable utility. We encourage our customers to ponder what they can do themselves with our wealth of salvaged materials. With so much remarkable and historical salvage dispersed across our three sites, we at LASSCO are often sorely tempted to take up and...
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5 December 2016
‘Dear God, What A Place’
LASSCO has acquired the complete furniture and fittings of the ill-fated modern bistro ‘Le Chabanais’, lately showered with ordure in the pages of The Daily Telegraph and the Guardian. It is a commonly held misapprehension that Henry VIII naval flagship, the Mary Rose, sank on her maiden voyage. The fate of the barque, packed to...
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1 November 2016
High Industrial Swagger On The Factory Floor.
LASSCO has come into posession of a large quantity of reclaimed Victorian maple strip flooring from the Ogden’s tobacco factory in Liverpool. Ogden’s Imperial tobacco factory was constructed in Liverpool on its Boundary Lane site in 1899 by the Architect Henry Hartley in a heterogeneous and pleasingly indiscriminate ‘Queen Anne style’. It was a statement...
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29 September 2016
Salvaged From Obscurity – Half A Century On.
LASSCO has unearthed a large batch of decorative tiles from an historic London architectural gem, long thought lost without a trace. ‘Southampton Buildings’, headquarters of the Birkbeck Bank, stood between High Holborn and Chancery Lane between 1896 and 1964. The vast Victorian banking hall was built in two years by T.R. Knightley and Co. At...
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16 June 2015
Commemorating Our Duke
Essentially our business is dealing in ‘history’. It’s debatable whether it’s usually history with a Big ‘H’ or history with a small ‘h’. Today, 16th June 2015, LASSCO at Brunswick House is touched by Big History. It marks the 200th anniversary of the death at the Battle of Quatre Bras of Frederick William, Duke of...
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22 September 2014
Brunswick House: setting for a thriller
When Len Deighton was writing “SS-GB” in 1978 – his spy-thriller set in the 1940’s and in a London that had succumbed to Nazi invasion – he would have relished the foggy railway yard and bleak urban landscape that Nine Elms then was: a setting for a gritty denouement. Deighton, the celebrated historian, cook and...