Running Free
21 October 2021
A behind-the-scenes look at a not-often-seen part of the antiques trade - talking to antiques runner Simon Pugh.
Thomas Woodham-Smith
Thomas Woodham-Smith is an art dealer and advisor, and our Fair Director.
Simon Pugh in his van, image courtesy of Simon Pugh.
Simon Pugh is a runner. Within the antiques business that is a familiar term, but outside it may seem a bit opaque. When my son Vladimir was asked at school what his father did, he replied that he was a dealer. In a South London primary school that only meant one thing and it wasn't to do with antiques. So I will explain briefly that a runner is; someone who ‘runs’ an object from one dealer to another. Sometimes they have bought it but more usually they have borrowed it; as they say they have it ‘on the elbow’, a bit of rhyming slang I have never worked out. The business of being a runner is therefore very fluid and speedy. If a runner has a piece for more than a few days he has failed and is either stuck with it or has to return it. Feast or famine, in fact it is usually a case of a meal or famine as the margins for runners are usually very tight or they are dealing in very low values, which for our business means under £750. As you might expect from such a business model, runners function out of vans, they don’t have shops or showrooms - everything is done by popping open their van doors and making their pitch to the prospective buyer there and then. You have to be tough, rhino hide level, because you have to be prepared for shop owners treating you with disdain, keeping you waiting and speaking superciliously. Your goods are rejected time after time until they find a happy home and all of this happens over a few hours. It is intense and can take its toll, but those that flourish in this incandescence can do very well. Runners are slender cats rather than fat ones, but they can flourish. They get to know a few favoured dealers well, to understand their taste and can rise to ‘preferred’ supplier status. But whilst in the heyday of the antiques trade runners abounded, now we are reduced to a few hardy survivors.
The first thing I notice about Simon, as he enters the pub where we are having lunch, the fabulous Michelin listed Canton Arms in South Lambeth Road, is his broad cheerful smile. He is a good-looking fellow with swept back silver hair and relaxed slightly hippyish attire. Perhaps he is a little tired looking, but he gives every appearance of being pleased to be there. He does not drink alcohol and I have a bit of a persistent cough (not Covid) and so we settle for a water-lubricated meal. Conversation begins and it quickly becomes apparent that he has had one hell of a life. There he sits before me as buoyant as anything, happily married, offspring and twenty years of robust trading behind him - but his journey here has been a picaresque Odyssey. He has coped with tragedy and all the tempting addictive demons that modern life puts before us and he has come through, weathered but not beaten. As we say in this business he is in ‘good country house condition’.
Simon says of himself that he is better at running other people's businesses than his own. What he means is that, when working for someone he can see ways of being innovative and entrepreneurial, but when he is the boss he sometimes cannot see the wood for the trees. Running away from home at the age 17, hand-in-hand with his first love, he had to get a job to live. Challenged by dyslexia before that was a well known thing he set out into the world of work unfettered by too much education (he failed English O level 13 times), and he managed to get a job selling jeans in the King’s Road for Pepe. His acumen quickly emerged as he managed to persuade Harrods to sell Pepe jeans, no mean achievement for a young lad. Moving from there he worked for and became a partner in ‘Boy’ the legendary punk outfitters. But he was having too much fun and, after a brief but formative adventure running an art gallery in Abingdon Road called ‘W8,’ he shed the fashion world and art was where he wanted to be. Through a family friend he got a job at Christie’s South Kensington. There he spent his university years, moving from mentor to mentor and from department to department ending up a graduate ready to take on the world of the antiques trade.
Simon Pugh, image courtesy of Simon Pugh.
In the hands of a defrocked porter from his alma mater he headed off into the world of running. After a short while as a traditional runner he was beguiled and distracted into selling repro furniture and fuelled by success and manic energy he found himself with a shop in Lillie Road and later one in Walton Street. This was the time of sky high interest rates and the vulture banks closed him down. Back at the bottom of the snake he met his future wife and bravely set off in life with her despite, or maybe because of, the fact that she already had a young child (Angus, now 26), they had a child together called Dylan and now live in domestic bliss in West Dulwich. Following settling down, his beloved called on him to get a ‘proper’ job, and out of loving compliance he took a job in telesales. He was good at it but after 6 months his wife took pity on him and released him back into the wild.
A brief stint as a stallholder in Portobello led Simon back into dealing through selling showroom props to many of the fashion brands, Diesel and Paul Smith for example. From there he has built up his business over the last 15 years so that he has a regular round of dealers and decorators in London; on average he sells two or three things a week. He keeps as little stock as possible and tries to only own things for a matter of weeks. Avuncular now at the age of 63 he wants to pass on what he has learnt and is keen to share his knowledge of furniture construction, timber and history. He says that he has never liked the idea of acting but he is a bit of a showman. He likes to wear a sort of cowboy hat and is always positive and blithe even when having his goods rejected. In other words he has been performing all his working life. Simon Pugh is in many ways the archetypal runner; he has led a maverick life, an office job would be an absurdity, he is constantly on the move, running to keep up with the ever-changing trade we work in. Currently he is gestating his next business idea and he has all the fire of a new man to get it going. He is both completely unique and at the same time emblematic.
A version of this article was previously published in The Critic Magazine.
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