A Warehouse You Find by Following the Glow
God's Own Junkyard sits inside Ravenswood Industrial Estate, off Shernhall Street in Walthamstow Village, about 25 minutes by Overground from Liverpool Street. The estate is the kind of place London hides its small fabrication workshops — a row of windowless brick units behind a chain-link gate. Unit 12 has no exterior sign. You walk in and the temperature changes by five degrees. Three hundred neon signs are pulling that much electricity at once.
The interior is organised, but only loosely. Signs hang from the rafters. Signs lean against support columns. Signs cover every wall surface. The largest piece is a 12-foot Las Vegas casino marquee. The smallest is a bedside-table-sized "OPEN" sign rescued from a Camden takeaway in 1989.
Chris Bracey's Quiet Empire
Chris Bracey was a third-generation neon artisan whose father, Dick Bracey, made signs for Soho's strip clubs in the 1950s. Chris took over the family business in the 1970s and spent the next four decades restoring and re-making vintage neon for a private list of clients that included Stanley Kubrick (he made all the neon for Eyes Wide Shut), David LaChapelle, Selfridges, and most of the Soho establishments that kept their facades looking like they did in 1965.
Bracey also collected. Whenever a Soho landmark closed — the Raymond Revuebar, the original Madame Jojo's — he would buy the sign rather than see it scrapped. By the time of his death in 2014, the personal collection had filled three warehouses. The family consolidated everything into Ravenswood and opened the doors to the public the same year.
The Family Still Runs It
Chris's widow, Linda, and their sons Marcus and Matthew run God's Own Junkyard now. Marcus is the lead restorer. Matthew handles new commissions, including signs for Tom Cruise's Edge of Tomorrow and an entire room of neon for the Joker sequel. The shop is officially open Friday through Sunday, plus events. The rest of the week the family is back in the workshop bending glass tubes by hand and filling them with argon.
The workshop occupies the back third of the warehouse. Visitors can usually see through to it. Tubes are bent over open gas burners — the old-school way, which Marcus says still produces a better light than LED imitation. A finished tube takes 45 minutes to bend, plus another two hours to electrify and seal.
The Café in the Middle
The Rolling Scones Café occupies a small clearing in the centre of the warehouse, sandwiched between a wall of pink wedding-chapel signs and a Christmas tree made of Vegas marquees. It serves cream teas, traybakes, and lattes. Sit there for half an hour and the regular customers come in — students from the nearby art school, retirees from Walthamstow Village, couples on second dates. The café is licensed for evening events.
Drinks are reasonable for London — a flat white is £3.80. The food is honest English bakery work. Nobody photographs the food, because the room around it is photographing itself in every direction.
What the Film Industry Borrows
A back corner of the warehouse holds the rental stock. Pieces here have been on more film sets than most extras: signs from the Batman trilogy, the Sherlock Holmes movies, Lady Bird, the recent Wonka remake. The rental day-rate is what funds the public-facing operation. Bracey set up the rentals in the 1990s as a sideline; now they pay most of the warehouse's running costs.
Chris's last commission, completed three weeks before his death in 2014, was the entire neon installation for Stanley Kubrick's daughter Vivian's gallery show in Camden. The original signs are still here, in a roped-off section near the workshop. The family has refused several offers to sell them.
How to Spend Two Hours
Walk the perimeter first, which takes about 30 minutes. Then sit at the café for a coffee and look up — the ceiling-mounted signs are the part of the collection most people miss because they're focused on eye level. Then revisit the corners with the strongest groupings: the Soho strip-club wall, the Hollywood props corner, and the rotating wedding chapel wall.
The light gets weirder as the warehouse darkens outside. Late afternoon — around 4 p.m. in winter — is when the signs start dominating. By 6 p.m. on a Friday it looks like a Wong Kar-wai film. That is the right hour to be there.
Practical notes
- Address: Unit 12, Ravenswood Industrial Estate, Shernhall Street, Walthamstow, London E17 9HQ
- Getting there: Overground to Wood Street; 8-minute walk via Shernhall Street
- Go for: The wall of original Soho strip-club signs, the Kubrick Eyes Wide Shut commission, the Vegas wedding chapel
- Size / timing: Roughly 5,000 sq ft, two hours including the café. Open Friday 11–9, Saturday 11–9, Sunday 11–6. Free entry.
- Photograph it, but know this: The light is so saturated that phone cameras blow out the highlights. Drop exposure compensation by one stop and shoot in RAW if you have it.
God's Own Junkyard is the rare London attraction that doesn't soften with repeat visits. The collection rotates as pieces are loaned to film productions and returned. The workshop is always making new signs. The cafe stays full of locals who treat the warehouse as a living room. It is one of the few places in the city where the past is still being lit, by hand, every week.
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Sources consulted: God's Own Junkyard · The Guardian · The Telegraph · Time Out London · Atlas Obscura
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