I would imagine we're pushing well over 1500 signs.
Our electricity bill at the moment is roughly around about £1,000 each month.
I'm just a hoarder,
and not a collector.
Hoarding is an understatement.
Old signs, amusements signs, metal signs,
enamel signs, road signs, signs, signs, signs,
neon, neon, neon.
When your working with neon,
all you need is love.
Hidden in London's East End lies
Gods Own Junkyard,
an Aladdin's cave of neon.
Here, they produce, display and sell some of the most famous neon in the world.
It’s run by one family: brothers Marcus and Matthew
and their mother, Linda.
And you might recognize a few from your favorite movies.
Batman.
We worked on that when I was 13 years old.
Bond six times Tomb Raider three times, Judge Dredd,
The Saint, the list goes on and on and on.
Mission Impossible you did didn’t you?
Yep, with Tom Cruise.
You know the bit when they winch down?
I was actually above him during that at 17 years out on set.
Blade Runner.
You've got the dragon over there.
Expendables.
We just did that that long ago.
Superman 4 with Christopher Reeves
And our youngest son, Max, he actually played the baby.
Superbaby, wasn’t he?
He was Superbaby.
Eyes Wide Shut,
we worked with Stanley Kubrick and we ended up doing the back lot.
We filled this New York street with fairy lights, neon lights,
it was fantastic.
And then on Friday night one night, we ended up
having a curry with him because we we worked late until about 12:00 at night
doing the lighting tests on this Rainbow Tuxedo sign
which was beautiful.
That was the primary part of the start of the film.
They chose me to drive a yellow taxi, a big New York taxi and drop him off
outside the Rainbow Tuxedo shop.
You just get a little glimpse of me driving
down the film set and then dropping him off.
You do feel proud because neon
is usually quite a big part of the the whole set,
so it kind of gives atmosphere.
It's nice to see that the work we're doing with our hands, and all the blood, sweat
and tears that we put into it goes into something so amazing.
The other thing I think, which is nice, is that it's immortalized,
you see? It's there forever.
This establishment's legendary legacy can be credited to one man, the late
Christopher Bracey, and his family continue his work to this day.
Chris was so inspirational to many people.
It wasn't just me.
The local people in London, I was amazed of his vision
He's like the
godfather of neon they say, the neon man within the industry.
He wanted to take neon to a higher purpose.
He was working with his father,
Dick Bracey, who
started the business in 1952, but he saw further
than just graphics on a sign, he wanted to make them arty.
When he was younger, he went to see an exhibition by Dan Flavin
and also was inspired by Bruce Nauman,
who a was sixties neon artist.
That took him down a path that that signs were not just
for commercial use, he could use neon as an art medium as well.
Everything was about dual meanings, he never just meant what you read
or what you thought it was. It was proper art.
You'd stand
and you could look at it for hours, and you still might not actually work out
what it was trying to say.
It was Chris's dream that,
one day we would be able to
put it all out on display and show it to the public.
And he was quite specific about it that it was for free.
Chris's dream became a reality, vut the place needed a name
as iconic as his neon.
Chris was sitting at the desk one evening
he shouts out, “euphoria, I've got a name”,
and he said it was ‘God's Own Junkyard’.
He was looking at an article by
an American architect called Peter Blake,
and he was actually saying that
all the big sky signs, motel
signs, gas station signs, mainly through Route 66,
were making God's own country into God's own junkyard.
And Chris just said, “all right, that's it,
fantastic, that's us”.
Chris's work can still be seen around the streets of London,
but over the years, the demand for neon has fallen,
as shop fronts and street corners opts for newer tech like LED.
I think that neon signs
to some extent will become rare.
There's only one neon powder
company left in the world maintaining the powders for the glass,
so if they don't make the powder, you can't get these different colors.
What everyone's saying is that neon signs are going to
be worth more money than gold
in about ten years.
We could be sitting in a gold mine.
Making these neon signs isn't a walk in the park.
Each one takes hours of love and craft.
It's a fragile product that you've got to be careful with.
It's not something that you can throw around.
Whoever you've got working with you on it has to be very careful
with, it has to learn how to handle neon.
The colors and the matching of colors and the way colors can mean something
in what you're portraying, it's really something that you think about a lot, don’t you?
as thing are being put together.
I always say that neon is our favorite color.
You gradually work your way up from little drawings
and sketches up into full scale drawings.
Once you've drawn up and you're happy with it, you take into the glass shop
and you bend these pure sodium, straight planes of glass
which are made from sand, so we basically bend over
1000 degree burners, these bits of glass.
We actually inlet the gasses in, the argon, the neon gas which we're breathing in now.
It's a pure gas.
And then we charge it with voltage and then obviously we’re there.
You’ve got that section.
When you charge that sign up
you go, “wow, it’s alive”.
Because sometimes it can fail, itr can have a crack in it,
you can overheat the glass and it dies on you,
and you’ve got to start again.
You get a buzz, you do get a charge yourself.
It's no surprise that ‘God’s Own Junkyard’
has a long list of famous fans from around the world.
Jamie Oliver, Lady Gaga, Jude Law,
there's a lot a A-list stars that come in and we create and design for them.
Axl Rose, Erasure, Thin Lizzy,
they've all had pieces made up and specially made
for themselves as well, as well as hiring the place for their
promo or video shoots too.
We also did a party, Sir Elton John.
We filled the garden with neon signs as they walked in.
Yeah, it looked amazing.
And then hid behind the bushes.
Yeah, we had to hide behind the bushes, didn’t we?
We wernt high profile enough.
When I look at what some of these signs really look like and what impact
and the presence of them being there on buildings, it's fantastic.
‘God’s Own Junkyard’ is to some extent is a labor of love.
The generic scale of it, it just sort of blows people away, it's just,
nice to see parts of London that have
traditionally got our signs up and working, they look fantastic.