In the tin-mining town of St Just, just north of Land’s End, there is a characterful little shop that seemed to spring up in the night like a mushroom just over a decade ago, the many-paned window of what had once been an old hardware shop suddenly filled with a treasure trove of curiosities, maritime salvage, painted sailor’s chests, sea shells and antique telescopes. The store, Cape Cornwall Arts and Antiques, is owned by Craig Chapman and his artist/craftsman partner of 30 years, Mandy Moon (they finally married just last year).
Craig belongs at the wild western tip of Cape Cornwall, for he is a natural historian who has been innately curious since his childhood. As a Rochdale schoolboy, he was always drawing and painting; as a young art student at London’s Middlesex Polytechnic, he was dismayed by the lack of formal teaching and decent life drawing classes, so he dropped out. Instead, he taught himself how to be an artist using the methods favoured by George Stubbs, making detailed studies of skeletons and musculature and then clothing them in flesh and paint. His favourite subjects are extinct birds, particularly the dodo and New Zealand moa – pictures of which he paints for himself – but ‘sacred groves were my thing,’ he explains.
Craig was part of the 80s New Wave, researching and writing for the cult magazine Northern Earth Mysteries, and remembers one occasion when he saw the ley-line hunter and earth-mysteries guru John Michel showing Charles III, then the Prince of Wales, the sacred well at Glastonbury. His own expertise in such pagan matters drew the attention of the Order of Bards and Druids and the publisher Thames & Hudson, who commissioned him to illustrate their Celtic and pagan titles.
Which brings us to St Just and Cape Cornwall Arts and Antiques. The marine salvage is the real, authentic thing: Craig has been researching and buying from divers, mariners and collectors for many years. He has old glass bottles salvaged from HMS Colossus, one of Nelson’s fleet ships returning from the Battle of the Nile; others come from an ancient wreck that sank off the Isles of Scilly and more still from a vessel that belonged to the East India Company.
Craig also searches for rare ethnographical curiosities from the South Pacific, prints charting the exploratory voyages of Captain Cook, whale bones, scrimshaw and the gigantic seed pods of the Coco de Mer (although, as he notes, many of these are no longer legally tradable items and belong to his own personal museum). Divers arrive bringing and selling him things trawled up from the deep, including a cargo of rusty portholes that he carefully restored. The donor had been threatened by his wife: ‘Either the portholes go or I do,’ he was told, as Craig ruefully reports. More pieces came from the Museum of Nautical Art that once sat on Penzance’s Chapel Street as well as the Richard Larn collection, which was part of the Charlestown Shipwreck Museum before that was sold off.
There is more prosaic hunter-gathering in the immediate locale. When the sheds and net lofts at the Newlyn trawler company Stevenson were cleared out, they produced a haul of nautical lamps and items dating back to prewar times. The very rarest things captured in the photographs accompanying this feature, however, are not for sale, belonging to the couple’s domestic habitat behind the shop. They were inherited from Mandy’s parents, who earned a living as antique dealers in Norfolk, travelling the country and enjoying the pleasures of a nomadic alternative lifestyle. Inside and behind the shop, Craig removed some more modern accretions – including a tiled 1930s fireplace and walls lined with industrial plastic sheets – to create a romantic interior that is wholly in keeping with his chosen avocation, as authentically antique as his store and its stock.
Cape Cornwall Arts and Antiques, 31 Cape Cornwall St, St Just, Penzance, Cornwall TR19 7JZ. For more information, ring 01736 438073
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