Silver Service

SILVER SERVICE

Source: Speak Up

Language level: Advanced

Speaker: Justin Ratcliffe

London is a wonderful destination both for tourists and students of English. It has many world-famous attractions, but the more interesting ones are less well known. A good example comes in the form of the London silver Vaults. They began life in 1876 as the Chancery Lane Safe Deposit, a place where rich Londoners stored their more valuable possessions. This explains why the Vaults are three floors underground. Today the site is occupied by 30 shops which are home to the largest antique silver collection in the world. Shopkeeper Steven Linden has worked here for his entire professional live:

Steven Linden

(Standard English/London accent)

I don’t think I’ve heard anyone say anything but, when they finally discover the Silver Vaults. “What a great place to come!” and there is a certain wow factor; we’ve got so much silver here, I don’t know how much, but, I had a guess, I’d say retail values over 50 million pounds worth of silver. And what’s interesting about it is we’re not a museum, therefore you can look at the piece, you can touch the piece, you could even buy the piece, and that’s nice. We have many visitors from all over the world, and they like to take a bit of London home with them, and rather than buy a hat with “London” written on it, isn’t nice to buy a nice piece of silver they can use in their home and tell their family, “I bought that in London” and in fact it was made in London and it’s sterling silver.

 He then talked about the sort of products his shop sold.

Steven Linden

What we are interested in, actually, are certainly antique collectibles of the George III period and earlier.

For example, recently I bought a very nice, quite long box, about three inches long, with a mirror inside.

Now, that is called “a toothpick box,” and a gentleman of the day – and I’m going back to 1780 – would have actually kept his pocket, and of course, when he goes out to dinner, he would have actually used it on a daily basis.

But some of the more modern silver products are even stranger:

Steven Linden

I’ve seen some incredible sights. The one that’s always stuck in my mind –it’s about 20 years ago – was when one of the shopkeepers with somebody’s help, were bringing in bits of something, sheets of it and squares of it and bits of it, and they were assembling this item for…about three days, and when they’d finished it turned out silver! And I have never since seen a more spectacular item!