MARCUS BRACEY: This is our neon wonderland.
COMM: This Walthamstow warehouse may look
unassuming from the outside, but within these walls lies a neon wonderland.
MARCUS BRACEY: Hello there! Hi! Welcome to
God’s Own Junkyard. Come on in.
COMM: Neon art has been a huge part of Marcus
Bracey’s life and his family’s for three generations.
MARCUS BRACEY: It started back in the 50s.
My grandfather, he was a coal miner from Wales. And he worked in the dark and he’d come
up to the light, he’d come up to East London, worked for a lighting company. And that was
in the 50s, where it kind of all started to unroll. He worked for fun fairs and carnivals
up and down the country, and he started to collect and up-cycle, he wouldn’t throw
anything away, hence why we’ve got so much, kind of a mish-mash mini Vegas going on in here.
COMM: But it was Marcus’ father Chris Bracey,
who gained the reputation as London’s go-to-guy for all things neon.
COMM: In a career that spanned 40 years, Chris
made everything from Soho sex shop sings to Hollywood movie props. And now members of
the public can come here and admire his work free of charge.
TOM ROOKE: It’s a bit like a treasure trove.
You walk in, it’s quite overwhelming. You are just hit immediately by the neon lights.
MARCUS BRACEY: This is our neon light gallery,
our museum of what we do every day. Over 1,400 pieces, I would imagine, hanging up in their glory.
MARCUS BRACEY: God Save The Queen, this was
on the front of British Airways magazines, this is a Chris Bracey art piece, which is
well featured and well known.
MARCUS BRACEY: Rainbow Tuxedos was in Eyes
Wide Shut, Stanley Kubrick. Oh, Find Love Upstairs. These are all signs that you get
outside sex shops, you know, when you go upstairs in the corridor. It’s Union Jack here, I
made this for Kate Moss. We’ve got plenty of famous celebrity customers that come in
to see us. We’ve got Kate Moss, Jude Law, Martin Creed, we’ve made a lot of things
for him, as well as other artists. You know, they will come to us, commission, come up
with an idea or slogan, and I’ll make something and we’ll go fit it and put it out it up
in their house. And they’ve got their own piece of art in them, their own piece of soul.
COMM: Most of the pieces on display are for
sale and prices can range from £400 to £60,000.
MARCUS BRACEY: I make all my neon in-house,
in our God’s Own Junkyard workshop. When you manufacture neon lights, the glass
comes in a straight kind of glass. Solder Murano kind of glass. We then take it into the glass shop,
we burn it over 800 degrees burners, and we bend it, we make it, we electro it, then we pump the gas into
it. Well, it's neon gas or argon gas, vacuum all the purities out and then we charge it
with high voltage to get that colour, that vibrance and that richness.
MARCUS BRACEY: Oh! It’s tripped out again! Typical.
MARCUS BRACEY: We often put much stuff on
these circuits. Guys, it just tripped out. Already this morning, it’s tripped out four
times. Every day we have to gradually turn all the switches on. It takes about five minutes.
Because if you fire it up in one go, it just blows and trips. The electricity bill comes
to over £700 a week, and if you get a film company turn up and they do a few location
shoots here, it could be up to over £1000 a week – it’s quite expensive.
MARCUS BRACEY: Neon is a luxury. If you got
your own neon piece, I mean, it’s a luxury and I’m addicted to it.
MARCUS BRACEY: People love neon, it’s not
all seedy, it’s not on the outside of Soho seedy bars anymore. It’s a contemporary neon art.
TOM ROOKE: This is the real deal. This is
North London’s version of Vegas.