A smashing collection of demolition treasures
Over 40 years John Stil has made it his mission to save artefacts from the scrapheap. Geraden Cann reports.
ALONG John Stil’s office bookcase are a row of old helmets – a leather police bobby hat, a yellow firefighter’s helmet emblazoned with the owner’s name in bright red letters, and the felt officer’s cap of an unknown serviceman.
Shuffling in his seat, readjusting his baseball cap and cream body warmer, Stil grabs the closest thing to hand: a collection of photos showing Wellington in its infancy, recently salvaged from a demolition. ‘‘People just leave that behind, can you believe it? It’s too good to throw away.’’
This mentality has led Stil to save hundreds of items from the scrapheap over more than 40 years in the demolition trade.
He picks up an iron cannonball and points to his desk, where a half-finished McKenzie coat of arms sits. He found it, he says, among building foundations at the bottom of Parnell Rise. From other clues in the soil a foundry once produced horseshoes and nails for early settlers.
There’s barely a corner of the Nikau Contractors office in Auckland that doesn’t hold artefacts from a pub, government building or train station. Stil has more at his and his children’s homes. He has made entire walls out of bricks still labelled with makers’ marks – a common practice back when bricks were made by hand.
Reclaimed bricks were once a big part of the trade, Stil says. He taps a framed photo of a Hoffman Kiln in New Lynn from which he says he salvaged a million bricks. ‘‘You would never ever be allowed to demolish that but in those days, the 1980s, it was ‘see ya later’.’’
At the office’s entrance a huge red tank sits on wagon wheels. It’s an early fire hydrant used at the Port of Auckland. ‘‘We got that probably 40 years ago. It’s not just me, most demo guys are magpies, you know?’’
Behind him, facing the reception, hangs a large polished brass coat of arms from the State
Insurance Building in
Takapuna. ‘‘They gave us a big list of things they wanted and that wasn’t on the list. We didn’t even know it was there because the building was white and that was whitewashed as well.’’
This is how many of the items have found their way to Stil. All were left, forgotten or disregarded. ‘‘You’d be really surprised what people have got under their house that they don’t even know they’ve got. Up in the
top of attics too...’’
In a hallway is a blown-up image taken around 1845, showing the earliest years of Grafton Rd in central Auckland. An early hospital is shown, and a female asylum is identified poking out from behind a cluster of trees. That image was saved from a basement.
Stil says back in the day his teams weren’t just salvaging things for interest’s sake – there was a real market for everything from toilet fittings to chimney pots. ‘‘We used to salvage everything because there was always a market for people with batches and demolition bricks were pretty jazzy in those days, but now everything is too cheap, it all comes from China.’’
Stil says in the past Kiwis were more willing to roll up their sleeves and do a little DIY, so old reclaimed hardwoods, floorboards and tiles were an attractive proposition.
‘You’d be really surprised what people have got under their house that they don’t even know they’ve got.’ JOHN STIL
The trade had changed. Demolishers used to quote low prices on the condition of longer time frames because they knew they would be able to sell a lot of the things they tore out.
Today, it is all about deadlines and getting the job done quickly.
‘‘The days of salvaging are well and truly gone where you salvaged everything in the house.’’
Despite his fascination with old things, Stil says he’s never been tempted to create a museum or exhibit. ‘‘I don’t think I’d go to that extent eh, because I think you might be divorced, because women don’t really like this sort of stuff, do they?’’
He chuckles and continues on the next story.
Stil’s four children and three grandchildren all work for Nikau, and a number have never had any other job. Demolition,
Stil says, has been good for his family since the company was incorporated in 1980.
Demolition always has the potential to become personal, he says , and one job stands out as particularly importand in Stil’s mind. He speaks about his experience following the Christchurch earthquakes a decade ago, when Nikau was one of the first on the scene to help with rescue and recovery efforts.
One of his sons worked with search and rescue teams to remove bodies from the Pyne Gould building, he says.
‘‘There were about 20 bodies in there, we had to help them get out. You do find a lot of stuff down there that’s quite distressing because it’s people’s property. ‘‘That’s what really gets you, those sorts of jobs you got to do.
‘‘With people’s own property you want to hand back to them if you found it, and we did.’’