WFI takes a sentimental journey, as it visits a man whose home is a shrine to days gone by.
A tour of Robert Opie's home is like getting inside one of those TV nostalgia programmes on Saturday night: you're surrounded by things - packets, boxes, wrappers, tins, toys - you remember from your childhood. Nose around long enough and you will come up with an Aztec or a Marathon bar, perhaps some old packets of Angel Delight, a lurid box of Omo, or a pristine Six Million Dollar Man doll, still in its original packaging.
To call Robert 'a collector of packaging' is an understatement
- he is a hoarder, of monumental proportions. He estimates that over the past three decades he's amassed an archive of half a million items. Add to this 200,000 miscellaneous 'social history' items - postcards, clothes, records, books and toys - and there's enough to stock a small museum, which is precisely what
he did do. Sadly, after 17 years, the Museum of Advertising and Packaging in Gloucester closed last year, and a big part of its collection has now been warehoused.
Robert began collecting British packaging in 1963, at the age of 16. His items are a social history of Britain from 1870 to the present day. Incredibly, his oldest item is
a 4,000-year-old opium container, in the shape of a poppy flower. Robert says it is one of the first examples of an item being sold in
a specially designed package.
But it was the Industrial Revolution that spawned a surge in advertising and packaging. "Britain led the world in mass production, and it was then that packaging really took off," he says. "In 1880, for example, Lever's was the first firm to individually package soap."
Robert's search for new and old original items is never-ending. "Whenever I go out, I see hundreds of items that I want," he says.
"The collection is like a huge jigsaw, and I'm constantly adding items to complete the picture."