Walsall has many things: a swanky bus station, a historic football ground, a proud history of craftsmanship - and it was once the centre of the world for leather making. It's also home to a shop where you can buy a decommissioned light machine gun, a motorbike turned into a bar and a set of ape statues flipping the bird - so obviously we had to visit.
Named The Dog House, the quirky one-of-a-kind shop puts Lidl's famous middle aisle to shame and has been sat proudly in Walsall for decades. The family-run firm is now run by the original owner's daughter, Fay Rutter, who runs it alongside the rest of the team.
Named The Dog House, the quirky one-of-a-kind shop puts Lidl's famous middle aisle to shame and has been sat proudly in Walsall for decades. The family-run firm is now run by the original owner's daughter, Fay Rutter, who runs it alongside the rest of the team.
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00:00In terms of things that people bring in, have you ever been surprised by
00:03something someone's brought in? Do you have a particular item you can think of
00:05where you're like, oh my god.
00:06Human femur, come in the other day.
00:08My name is Fay, I'm 55 years old and I'm born and bred in Walsall.
00:13My job is to work in this place, the Dog House Antiques in Walsall.
00:18How would I describe this shop? It's a bit of a mishmash of everything.
00:22I like to think that we're sort of like antique sellers, we do reproduction,
00:28we do upcycled stuff, we recycle, we do a little bit of everything.
00:34My parents originally started the business about 55 years ago now.
00:39They still put in an appearance from time to time but we've actually been on
00:43this premises for 36 years. We moved here in 1988.
00:49In this shop we sell anything from like a 10p coin,
00:53we have a yellow submarine which was a remote operated vehicle,
00:58we sell wind up clocks, battery clocks, we sell, oh you name it,
01:05we sell it. We see all sorts of weird and wonderful
01:09from teeth dentures that turn up in tins. The other day we had a teacher
01:16come in who'd stopped teaching, he was a biology teacher I think,
01:21and he brought in some skulls, some sheep skulls and things.
01:25But in amongst this job lot of bones there's a human femur.
01:29So that's the weirdest thing I've had so far this week.
01:32I've always had a passion for like sort of
01:36buying something, cleaning it up and seeing it come back to life again and
01:40the history on some of these pieces you can sort of think oh my god what
01:44you know the life some of these things have had.
01:48So it's always been a passion of mine and it's passion everybody that works
01:51here really. I mean we're here six days a week from, I say nine till
01:56five, I mean quite often we're here till later
01:58sort of doing things up or you know making things saleable again.
02:04I think it's also on a bigger scale,
02:07really important. I think we're such a disposable society these days,
02:12so much stuff gets imported, it's used for
02:15a few months, it's thrown out to landfill.
02:18I think that this workmanship, this quality, this durability
02:24and it just saves stuff getting wasted, it helps the environment, it's
02:31recycling in this way is just a completely different way to just
02:35putting your plastic bottles in the recycle. It's a great way of saving the
02:39planet, saving some money and enjoying something.
02:43Over the years the store's developed in lots of different ways because fashions
02:47come and fashions go. Brown furniture was in fashion at one
02:51point and now it's not and you know various things come and go so
02:55we have to adapt to suit what's in fashion at the time.
03:00I like to call this an early music box, it's actually a polyphon.
03:05It's from sort of late, well mid to late Victorian.
03:09So this actually came from a shop in West Bromwich
03:14it's probably been in a bar or something at some point.
03:17It runs from a penny, I put the penny in the slot at the side
03:28and you've heard the expression it takes a long time for the penny to drop.
03:34Well this plays two revolutions and the penny drops after the first
03:39and people go oh that took a long time for the penny to drop
03:43so a bit of trivia for you there. I love it when you get like a really old
03:50distressed kitchen table and it can come in and it goes into the workshop and
03:54we strip it all back and tighten it all up and make it look really good.
03:58It goes for a lot of love and attention in the workshop. We do this with all
04:02sorts of things whether it be tables, clocks, all sorts of things.
04:08Really fashionable at the moment is these sort of like recycled leather
04:12pieces of furniture, recycled chesterfields, wingback chairs,
04:17fireside chairs, that sort of stuff which I think is
04:20brilliant because it saves it from going to landfill.
04:23There's a lot of stuff that isn't worth what it used to be worth
04:28but it still deserves life and it's a change of fashion
04:31and maybe in years to come it will you know take off again and become
04:35fashionable again. Anything that raises the profile of
04:38National Recycle Week can only be a good thing and I think the more of us
04:42that are aware of you know how things can be recycled
04:47like I say it's good for the planet, it's good for our pockets too.